Twenty million people in Yemen are in need of humanitarian assistance, and more than half of them are on the verge of famine or severely malnourished. The chief cause of this is the Saudi-led coalition blockade:

Yemen is “racing towards the edge of a cliff,” Lootsma said, and “the one controlling the direction of the bus keeps going and pushes the accelerator, all but certain to crash.” He did not name the “driver,” but in an earlier statement, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) alleged that the ongoing blockade of Yemeni ports by a Saudi-led military coalition is largely to blame for the food shortages. “The unwarranted restrictions on the flow of commercial and humanitarian goods and services into Yemen and impeding distribution within the country are paralyzing a nation that for far too long has been a victim of war,” said U.N. Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy in April. Specifically, he cited long delays or denial of entry to Yemeni seaports: “The blockade involves grave breaches of the most basic norms of human rights law, as well as of the law of armed conflict, which cannot be left unanswered,” he said.

I bring this up as often as I can when writing about the severe humanitarian crisis in Yemen, because it is important to understand how the crisis was created and what needs to change in order to address it. Many reports on Yemen’s looming famine and growing cholera epidemic don’t mention the blockade’s significant role in creating and exacerbating these terrible conditions, but it isn’t possible to alleviate these disasters effectively without realizing that they came about as a direct result of deliberate policy choices by reckless client governments. Ongoing U.S. support for the coalition’s war and blockade implicates our government in those choices and their horrible consequences. That responsibility obliges the U.S. to put pressure on the coalition to change its policy and abandon the blockade. If the blockade remains in place, and if other coalition actions to impede relief efforts continue to go unchallenged, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis will just keep getting worse with Washington’s tacit blessing.