The blockade starving Yemen of essential goods remains in force, and it is depriving millions of vital fuel supplies:

No fuel shipments have reached Yemen’s largest port for a month, a Reuters analysis of port and ship tracking data shows, as a Saudi Arabian-led blockade on the war-torn country tightens despite international calls for the siege to end.

Tankers laden with oil have turned away from Hodeida, the biggest entry point for cargo to the devastated north, without unloading. The United Nations’ body tasked with inspecting ships seeking to enter the area said on Wednesday it could not say when such ships would be allowed through.

The shortage means areas hardest hit by war, malnutrition and cholera lack functioning hospital generators, cooking fuel and water pumps. It also makes it harder to move food and medical aid around the country.

So long as the Saudi-led coalition keeps out commercial imports of food, medicine, and fuel, thousands upon thousands of Yemenis will die every month from starvation and disease that could have been prevented and/or treated. The famine that aid agencies have predicted has not been averted and cannot be averted by the trickle of humanitarian assistance that the coalition is allowing in. A full lifting of the blockade is the only sure way to prevent this catastrophe from consuming millions of innocent lives. The lack of fuel to run water pumps is especially dangerous because it means that millions of Yemeni civilians do not have clean drinking water, and that makes the spread of water-borne diseases more likely. Yemen has already enduring the worst and fastest-spreading cholera epidemic ever recorded, and the blockade is making the continued spread of the disease more likely while severely impeding efforts to combat the epidemic.

The tightened blockade has already driven up the number of Yemenis on the verge of famine from seven million to eight and a half million:

Over 17 million Yemenis (close to two-thirds of the population) is food insecure while a staggering 8.5 million people are on the brink of starvation.

In all, close to 21 million people across Yemen are in need of humanitarian or protection support.

Those numbers will keep rising as long as the coalition’s cruel collective punishment of the people of Yemen is permitted to continue.