Geneva – SAM for Rights and Liberties stated that World Children’s Day in Yemen is no longer an occasion for celebration, but rather a moment of collective accountability for a decade of war that has turned children’s lives into an open arena of hunger, fear, displacement, and deprivation, producing in 2024 and 2025 a new wave of compounded violations that threaten both their present and their future.
The organization added that with more than a full decade having passed since the outbreak of the war, the Yemeni child can no longer obtain even the most basic components of human existence. Childhood years have transformed into a daily battle for survival, marked by continuous deprivation of food, medicine, education, and protection, amid state fragmentation and the collapse of societal capacity to provide even minimal safety nets.
Childhood in Yemen is no longer merely a vulnerable group within the context of war; it has become the very heart of the humanitarian tragedy, a stark indicator of state collapse, the breakdown of social structures, and the persistence of impunity. And while international conventions obligate all parties to protect children, global silence remains one of the largest moral failures enabling this catastrophe to continue.
UNICEF data from Geneva on 25 March 2025 shows that half of Yemen’s children under five (50%) suffer from malnutrition, including more than 540,000 children in severe acute malnutrition, alongside 1.4 million pregnant and breastfeeding women facing the same conditions. Food prices have risen by more than 300% in ten years, while ports and vital roads—lifelines for food and medicine—have been destroyed or obstructed. Practically, this means millions of children go to bed and wake up hungry in an environment where families cannot meet even the minimum nutritional needs.
On 16 October 2025, international organizations warned -through a joint briefing on Yemen’s escalating hunger- that the country had become the world’s third-worst food crisis, with nearly half of the population facing hunger and almost half of all children under five suffering from chronic malnutrition (stunting). The document noted that more than 100 districts are now in critical nutritional emergency, with reported child deaths due to starvation in districts such as Abs in Hajjah, and a projected increase of 15–30% in acute malnutrition in Hodeidah and Taiz by the end of the year.
The same document warned that by early 2026, more than 18 million people in Yemen will be in crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity, including around 41,000 at risk of famine, at a time when funding for food security and nutrition programs has fallen to its lowest level in a decade. Over 2,800 treatment facilities have shut down, and most therapeutic food supply pipelines have collapsed. This pattern of deprivation is not merely a lack of food; it represents a lifelong loss of children’s physical and cognitive capacities, turning hunger into one of the most dangerous tools of impoverishment and slow violence against childhood.
According to the NRC factsheet (May 2025), the education sector is among the most neglected in the humanitarian response. An estimated 6.8 million children and youths urgently need educational support, while only 28% have received any. Approximately 3.2 million children are completely out of school, including 1.6 million displaced children and around 594,000 children with disabilities. This reality pushes millions toward child labor, recruitment, or street survival instead of learning.
The same document reports that 65% of teachers receive no salaries or incentives, and that severe overcrowding, deteriorating school buildings, and the lack of books and learning materials have forced many teachers to leave the profession, leaving learning environments fragile and vulnerable to violence and recruitment. Coupled with bombings and the military use of schools—documented by Yemeni and international organizations since 2015—education has shifted from a guaranteed right to a rare privilege. Illiteracy and child dropout rates continue to rise, especially in rural areas and displacement camps.
SAM added that dozens of attacks on educational and health facilities—alongside earlier UNICEF estimates of 4.5 million children out of school and around 3,000 schools damaged or militarized over seven years—threaten Yemen with the loss of an entire educated generation, turning children into easy fuel for future cycles of violence and poverty.
Data compiled by Yemeni organizations in the “Justice4yemen Pact” shows that grave violations against children continued at alarming levels in 2024. Between February 2023 and September 2024, 283 grave violations were documented, including killing, maiming, recruitment, sexual violence, abduction, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access. The data indicates that 84% of these violations were committed by the Houthi group, 14% by government forces and the Southern Transitional Council, and 2% by unidentified actors—clear evidence that all parties are engaged in violence against children, and that impunity fuels repeated crime.
SAM’s broader documentation shows that between 2014 and mid-2020, more than 30,000 violations were recorded against children, including the killing of 5,700 children. Responsibility for these abuses was distributed among the Houthis (70%), the Saudi-UAE coalition (15%), the government (5%), and other actors (10%). This reflects a persistent pattern of violence against children from the beginning of the war to the present, with evolving methods but within the same framework of impunity.
On 13 July 2025, Save the Children reported the death of five children in Taiz after unexploded ordnance detonated while they were playing football. This raised the number of children killed by landmines and UXO in the first half of 2025 to at least 40. During that same period, 107 civilians were killed or injured by these remnants, according to the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project.
The organization added that in 2024 alone, 260 civilians were killed or injured by landmines and UXO, more than one-third of them children, making Yemen one of the most contaminated countries in the world. According to the UN, between August 2023 and July 2024, 79 landmine explosions occurred in Hodeidah and other areas, killing 49 people and injuring 66 others, including children. Vast agricultural areas and villages have effectively become no-go zones due to the threat of sudden death beneath civilians’ feet.
A 2024 study titled “Multidimensional Poverty Analysis for Households and Overlapping Deprivations Among Children in Yemen” shows that poverty is no longer merely lack of income but a web of deprivations in food, health, education, water, sanitation, shelter, and protection. A large proportion of children—across several age groups—experience deprivation in multiple dimensions concurrently, with some indicators exceeding 60–70% among children aged 0 to 17. This means that a child is simultaneously deprived of sufficient food, clean water, proper education, and safe housing.
Within this complex landscape, children’s suffering becomes deeply interconnected; a child forced out of school to work often ends up in hazardous environments without any protection or safety equipment. The study showed that child labor stands at 15.9 percent, while 23.4 percent of working children are engaged in dangerous conditions. These rates are expected to rise amid economic deterioration and the reduction of aid programs in 2025. This cycle of deprivation fuels recruitment, child marriage, school dropout, and turns poverty into a broad vessel for multiple violations against children.
SAM for Rights and Liberties stresses that protecting childhood in Yemen is no longer solely a humanitarian concern but a prerequisite for societal survival itself, amid fast-deteriorating conditions that threaten the lives of millions of children and undermine their access to health, education, and safety. In this context, SAM calls for an urgent set of measures directed at local and international actors to ensure comprehensive and sustainable child protection.
1. Ending grave violations against children unconditionally
SAM urges all parties to halt all operations that target or affect children directly or indirectly, including indiscriminate shelling, recruitment, sexual violence, exploitation, abduction, and the use of schools and hospitals for military purposes. The organization calls for practical measures and monitoring systems to prevent recurrence of these crimes.
2. Completely depoliticizing education and rehabilitating schools
SAM calls for removing all political and military influence from educational facilities, reopening and rehabilitating damaged schools, ensuring safe access to quality education, restoring teacher salaries, and providing basic educational materials.
3. Combating recruitment in all forms and rehabilitating victims
The organization demands an end to all types of child recruitment and the establishment of national reintegration programs offering psychosocial support, family reunification, remedial education, and social protection.
4. Addressing hunger and malnutrition through sustainable interventions
SAM urges authorities, the UN, and donors to address the hunger crisis by expanding therapeutic feeding programs, restoring supply chains, providing direct cash assistance to the poorest families, and ensuring unhindered humanitarian access.
5. Expanding psychosocial and social protection programs
The organization calls for specialized mental health centers for children affected by war, including survivors of sexual violence, landmine victims, orphaned children, and those suffering trauma-related disorders.
6. Accelerating and expanding mine clearance operations
SAM urges immediate and sustainable funding for mine-action programs and awareness campaigns, the creation of a national registry for child victims, and comprehensive medical and prosthetic support for survivors.
7. Ensuring unimpeded humanitarian access
SAM calls on all parties to lift restrictions hindering humanitarian organizations, ensure safe operating environments, release detained aid workers, and guarantee legal protections for humanitarian staff.
8. Establishing an independent international accountability mechanism
The organization stresses the need for a specialized international mechanism to document and investigate grave violations against children since the beginning of the conflict.
9. Centering children in any future peace process
SAM calls on regional and international mediators to prioritize child protection in all political negotiations, noting that any peace that fails to guarantee children’s rights will remain fragile and prone to collapse.