US military aircraft bombed a reservoir in the Mansouriya district of Al-Hodeidah Governorate in western Yemen, cutting off water to more than 50,000 people, Al-Masirah TV reported on 2 April.
“As a result of enemy attacks on the Al-Senif water reservoir and the Water Resources Administration building in the Mansouriya area, more than 50,000 citizens were left without water supplies,” the Yemeni channel stated.
Renewed US bombing of Yemen is compounding an already dire situation made worse after US President Donald Trump cut US humanitarian aid to the country.
“Now the rampant bombing has started, you never know which way things will go,” said Siddiq Khan, who works as a country director in Yemen for the aid charity Islamic Relief.
Khan told The Guardian that the recent bombings were intensifying pressure on an aid sector already on the brink of collapse. He attributed this crisis to other Trump-era measures, including massive USAID cuts and legal hurdles for aid groups following the designation of Ansarallah, Yemen’s governing resistance movement, as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
“Overall, there has been a gradual but then sharp kind of decline in humanitarian aid to Yemen,” Khan went on to say. “Obviously, many organizations are kind of downsizing, and some have closed as well.”
“The bombings have further scared the organizations here about whether this will be the right place to stay and work. So overall, there’s a huge vacuum … taking over the humanitarian sector here,” he added. “I see a real catastrophe coming Yemen’s way.”
The US military has been bombing Yemen since 15 March, after Yemen’s Ansarallah-led government announced its intention to resume attacks on Israeli-linked vessels in the Red and Arabian Seas in response to Israel’s blockade on Gaza.
The US has twice bombed a cancer hospital in the country’s north, Yemen’s Saba news agency has reported, accusing the US of “full-fledged war crimes by targeting civilians and civilian objects, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries in several governorates.”
Yemen has been attacking Israeli-linked ships and targets in Israel since November 2023 in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has killed over 50,000 people, turned wide swathes of the strip into an uninhabited wasteland, and displaced virtually all of its over 2 million residents.