Yemen’s already dire hunger crisis is teetering on the edge of outright catastrophe, with 17.4 million people now in need of food assistance and a growing portion of the population coping with emergency levels of hunger, UN agencies have warned.

The humanitarian situation in the country is poised to get even worse between June and December 2022, with the number of people who likely will be unable to meet their minimum food needs in Yemen possibly reaching a record 19 million people in that period, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF alerted, following today’s release of a new  Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) analysis on Yemen.

At the same time, an additional 1.6 million people in the country are expected to fall into emergency levels of hunger, taking the total to 7.3 million people by the end of the year, the agencies added.