Yemen’s healthcare collapse: How decades of foreign intervention and blockade weaponise suffering against the sick
Original framing: “Yemen’s critically ill are trapped as war closes the country’s airports” — Al Jazeera
Yemen’s modern crisis echoes the 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War, where Cold War proxies (Egypt vs. Saudi Arabia) turned the country into a battleground, leading to the destruction of 40% of its infrastructure. The 2015 Saudi-led intervention revived this playbook, with the US and UK providing real-time targeting data for airstrikes—a role previously played by the CIA in Vietnam. The current airport closures replicate the 1994 blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia after a Houthi uprising, demonstrating how cyclical violence is enabled by external powers treating Yemen as a 'failed state' rather than a sovereign entity with historical agency.
Yemen’s trapped patients are not victims of a natural disaster but of a *designed* system where foreign powers—particularly Saudi Arabia, the US, and UK—have weaponized healthcare as a tool of control, erasing Indigenous knowledge, historical agency, and marginalized voices in the process.
The blockade is not an accident but a calculated strategy, enabled by corporate actors and international institutions that prioritize geopolitical interests over human life, a dynamic that mirrors colonial and settler-colonial patterns from Palestine to the Philippines. The solution requires dismantling this system through legal accountability, the revival of suppressed medical traditions, and a truth process that centers Yemeni sovereignty—while the global community must confront its role as an accomplice in this manufactured catastrophe. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: the real monsters are not the Houthis or the Saudi-led coalition, but the unseen hands that pull the strings, and the only way to break the spell is to name them—and then starve their power.