Yemen: Donated UN food aid for the most needy sold in markets to boost stallholders’ profits

Published

2 years ago

March 24, 2023

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A Sky News team inside Yemen has discovered shocking evidence that donated UN food aid meant for the most needy is instead being sold in street markets to help boost stallholders’ profits.

We found that donated cans of vegetable oil with World Food Programme (WFP) stamps on them were among the essential food items being sold in the province of Hodeidah. Alongside the WFP stamp, there were clear signs in English on the can saying “not for sale”.

In the same market stall in al Khokha, our investigations revealed sacks of flour and rice, also with large lettering saying “not for sale”, which appeared to have been donated by aid agencies from South Korea.

Warning: This article contains images some may find distressing

When we confronted the shopkeeper, he at first denied he was selling donated food aid. He then tried to hide the incriminating World Food Programme cereal packets that we had spotted on his counter.

When we continued to press him and drew attention to large supplies of the donated cereal at the back of his store, he admitted he knew he was not meant to be selling the donated goods.

He then insisted he would halt the practice that day – an assurance which few who heard him actually believed, given the large stock of donated aid he had in his small store.

But he insisted that he was certainly not the only stallholder selling food aid – and that he was fulfilling a “service” to desperate villagers.

“People come to me who have received the food aid but they need to sell it to me so they can buy medicine for their children. They sell it and I buy it in an emergency,” he attempted to explain.

Our investigation comes as the United Nations latest figures showed that children are the biggest victims in Yemen’s eight-year-old war.

According to UN figures, a child dies in Yemen every 10 minutes from preventable causes. That is a staggeringly high number of unnecessary deaths.

There are an estimated 11 million children who are identified as needing humanitarian aid in Yemen.

We are the first foreign journalist team inside Yemen since Iran and Saudi Arabia announced a dramatic breakthrough which has taken the country the closest it has got to possible peace in the eight years of conflict.

What we’ve discovered is both heartbreaking and shocking.

Ahad emaciated and weak

We saw a three-year-old little girl called Ahad being brought into a remote, basic clinic in al Khokha to try to get help.

Her ribs were protruding through her stretched skin. Her eyes were huge in the centre of a gaunt face and her limbs seemed massively elongated because of the lack of muscle or fat anywhere on her body.

She weighed just 3kg – at three years of age – that’s less than what an average newborn weighs fresh out of their mother’s womb.

Ahad couldn’t stand or sit because she was so emaciated and weak. She has Down’s syndrome too which is rarely seen here and the nurses who’re trying to care for her seem powerless to stop her slow inexorable decline. She is literally starving to death.

She’d only relatively recently been discharged from the small field hospital which operates here – just 10 days ago when she’d reached 4kg. In less than a fortnight, she’d dropped a kilo that she simply cannot afford to lose and which could cost her life.

Her father Saeed Saleh told us: “She just keeps bringing up the food we give her. She can’t seem to keep anything down.”

The tragedy for Yemen is that she is certainly not a rare case. At the same time as Ahad was being re-admitted, a six-month-old baby boy called Abdullah Mohammed Abdullah was crying in the arms of his 16-year-old mother.

As she rocked him backward and forward and tried to comfort her baby boy, the nurses noted she too looked malnourished.

She was certainly struggling to breastfeed. That could have explained why her little boy was a mass of skin and bone with the same huge starving eyes peering out from a skeletal face and body where the line of every rib can be clearly seen.

Read more:
Victims of forgotten war

There seems to be desperation and starvation everywhere. At the al Jasha camp for internally displaced people (IDP), there are nearly 9,000 people living in squalor. It is a place where only misery is guaranteed.

Within seconds of us arriving, we were surrounded by angry people begging us for help and insisting in loud voices they were desperate and they were hungry.

“We don’t have anything to eat. Not even a little bit of rice. Nothing. We are suffocating, we are dying,” one man yells.

The UN humanitarian chief recently warned that essential aid programmes were being closed down because of funding cuts and food rations had been reduced for eight million people in Yemen.

For a country in the grips of a humanitarian catastrophe it’s a bleak and terrifying future for millions.

Alex Crawford reports from Yemen with Middle East editor Zein Ja’far, cameraman Jake Britton and Yemen producer Ahmed Baider

World

‘The drones are always there… like a punishment’: A diary of daily life in Gaza

Published

5 hours ago

August 31, 2025

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'The drones are always there... like a punishment': A diary of daily life in Gaza

“We call drones our loyal friends, because they never leave us.”

Tasneem hears Israeli drones overhead, a constant fact of life in Gaza. It gets into your head, into your chest, she says.

“You can’t think, you can’t sleep. You can’t even be.”

“It’s always there, hanging above our heads, like some kind of punishment,” she says. In the background, the slow, constant buzz of a drone is audible.

“The people here in Gaza know that when the drone gets very low, at this level, something will happen. We all know what that something is… I don’t want to mention it.”

Tasneem al Iwini is 24. Like her peers across the world, she splits her time between work, studying for a master’s degree and spending time with her family of six.

Except she also has to deal with warplanes screaming overhead, rocketing food prices and the possibility that any day could be the last for her or her loved ones as Israel continues its war in Gaza.

To give a sense of what day-to-day life is like for her in Deir al Balah, Tasneem recorded a series of audio diary entries over the course of a week as part of her work with ActionAid and shared them exclusively with Sky News.

Day One: At least I’m still breathing

It’s incredibly hot today, Tasneem says. The kind of heat that makes your skin heavy and your thoughts slower.

I had so many things to do on my plate today, but honestly, I couldn’t move.

There’s no electricity and no fans, no air conditioner. So here I am just laying on my mattress and sweating.

My only relief is my plastic tray. I’m just using it as my personal fan…

I keep waving it back and forth, not to cool the room, but just to trick my brain into thinking I have control over this heat.

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m somewhere cold, as I actually prefer winter.

But then I hear the buzz of flies and mosquitoes in my ear and I remember this is Gaza, summer 2025. It’s exhausting, but at least I’m still breathing.

Day Two: Rocketing price of food

It’s Friday, which is a special day for us as it is the day we usually wait to cook something special. Today we are cooking maqluba (a traditional dish consisting of meat, rice and fried vegetables).

We haven’t tasted any kind of real protein like meat, chicken or fish for more than three months. I really miss chicken and fish badly.

But even this fake maqluba costs a lot, so many families can’t afford it… vegetables are very expensive.

Before the war we used to cook maqluba with at least four kilos of eggplants, because we are crazy about eggplants and its taste in maqluba . Now, if we manage to cook it with only two eggplants, that’s considered a luxury.

The price of one kilo of eggplant is more than 45 shekels. That’s approximately $12.50. Talking about tomatoes, the price is more than 90 shekels, which is approximately $27 per kilo.

Day Three: The drone reality

Here we go again. Our dear friend, the drone, Tasneem says as a buzzing noise hums in the background.

It just never leaves. It’s always there hanging above our heads like some kind of punishment.

The sound, I don’t even know how to describe it.

It’s not just noise. It gets into your head, into your chest. You can’t think, you can’t sleep, you can’t even be.

It drains something inside you slowly, and yet we live with it every day.

Later on:

Hi again. I’m just recording the gunfire. We are not sure what is happening outside, actually.

I can say that this is almost an every afternoon routine.

Day Four: A message to the world

Today I came across a small community kitchen, one of the very few still functioning.

Because of the current situation, especially the scarcity of food and the near-total blockade on the humanitarian aid, most of these kitchens have shut down…

Tasneem says that just after she left the office, the community kitchen was hit in an Israeli strike.

Three youths were killed, and many children were injured.

Those children were playing around and nearby the kitchen…

This time I went to send a message to the world, with a heavy heart burdened by the challenges and the impossible conditions we live under.

I still hold on to hope that this war will end… Because honestly, here in Gaza, we have lost trust in the world, governments and every actor.

Day Five: How many children must die?

Good evening, dear friends. I don’t really know what to say. I feel like my heart is just a drain.

Yesterday I promised to take you through the rest of my day, but honestly, I came home feeling exhausted…

I bought just two cucumbers, and that cost me $8. Yes, $8 for two cucumbers.

This is what it means to say that even the basics have become impossible to get in Gaza.

I came home, washed the cucumbers and cut them into small pieces so all of us could taste what it feels like to eat cucumber.

Tomatoes are even worse. They are completely unaffordable in the market.

And every time I think about the situation we are living through here in Gaza, I feel like I’m out of patience. I just can’t take more.

How many of us have to die before the world decides to intervene? And how many children must die, not from bombing or shelling, but from starvation and malnutrition?

Today, the telecommunications company in Gaza announced that in the next 24 hours it is expected that internet services will shut down again because of the fuel shortage and because of the occupation, who continue to block fuel from entering the Strip.

And this does not mean losing the internet only. It means patients in the ICUs will lose connection to life. It means ambulances, fridges for medications and blood, even water pumps for both drinking and domestic use will stop working.

I was planning today to come home and study for my final exams, but I just sat there for a moment thinking about our reality.

And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything. So instead, I decided to record this for you. This is what Gaza looks like right now.

Day Seven: The cemetery is full… and the horror of jets overhead

There are many types of weapons being used… and here in Gaza, we the people have learned to genuinely distinguish between them.

We know each sound by heart.

For example, we know the sound of the F-16 (fighter jet) very well. We can even guess when it has a target.

It has a special tone, like it’s rushing towards something. There is a tension in the air, and we feel it in our bodies.

Whenever I hear one of them, I swear I feel like this is the last moment of my life. I cover my ears with both hands and run to stay nearby my family, because in this moment my heart tells me, if something happens, let it happen to all of us together.

I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how I cope. That’s the only way I feel some false sense of control…

Sometimes it feels like the pilot is showing off, flying lower over the heads of women, children and civilians, as if to say: “Look at me. I can do this.”

Every time the jets go low, I start praying, I do everything I can as if it is the end of my life.

In another voicenote from the same day, Tasneem talked about her walk to work.

I pass by the cemetery every day. Today, I saw a situation that truly broke my heart.

There was a group of angry people gathered around the person who is responsible for digging graves.

They were shouting, saying the cemetery is completely full, and now they have started opening all the graves without knowing who is buried there and without getting any consent from the families of the dead.

They are placing new dead bodies on the top of the old ones, whether they are men, women or children.

Most people were furious, and honestly, I was so disappointed and heartbroken when I saw this.

This is one of those things I wish I never had to witness, but I wanted to share it with you, because it says so much about how bad things have become.

‘Critical moment’ for Gaza

Tasneem works with the Palestinian NGOs Network in Gaza and has partnered with ActionAid in the UK.

A spokesperson for ActionAid UK said: “Humanitarian workers like Tasneem are risking their lives every day to support and advocate for their fellow Palestinians in Gaza, despite experiencing the same intolerable conditions that they are.

“Just imagine having to go to work when you haven’t had a proper meal in days, knowing that at any moment you could be killed by bombing: that is their daily reality. Yet still, people like Tasneem are bravely speaking out and telling their stories so that the world knows the truth about the horrors they are facing…

“This is a critical moment. It’s time for the world to take meaningful action and use every diplomatic lever available to bring about a permanent ceasefire and end the siege on Gaza immediately so that food and other aid can enter unhindered, rapidly and at scale.”

World

‘The drones are always there… like some sort of punishment’: Woman’s diary of daily life in Gaza

Published

14 hours ago

August 31, 2025

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