SANAA — A cholera outbreak that resurfaced in February has accelerated through displacement camps around Hodeidah and along the western foothills above Saada as U.S. and Saudi airstrikes on Houthi missile and drone launch sites drive a second wave of civilian flight, with aid agencies warning Saturday that two of the country’s largest water-treatment plants were days from failure for lack of fuel.

The World Health Organization, in a bulletin issued from Cairo, said it had recorded 14,820 suspected cholera cases and 312 associated deaths since February 14, with the steepest acceleration over the past ten days. Roughly 64 percent of new cases, the agency said, were being reported from sites that had received internally displaced families fleeing the latest round of strikes on Houthi positions, where overcrowding, ruptured sewage lines and gaps in chlorinated water supply had created what WHO regional emergency director Dr. Rana Al-Sharif called “a textbook propagation environment.”

“We have been here before, and we know what the curve looks like,” Al-Sharif said in a telephone briefing. “If we do not get fuel into the pumping stations at Hayma and Al-Marawi’ah within seventy-two hours, and chlorine into camp distribution by the end of the week, we will be looking at a doubling every six days.”

The latest displacement wave, the third since the war began, has been triggered by an intensified U.S.-Saudi air campaign targeting Houthi launch infrastructure used to fire ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones at U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea and at southern Israel. U.S. Central Command, in a statement Friday, said strikes over the prior week had destroyed 41 launchers, 12 storage bunkers and a command node west of Saada. Houthi-controlled media, in a separate accounting, reported civilian casualties at sites the United States and Saudi Arabia identified as military, including a workshop on the outskirts of Hodeidah and a fuel depot near Hajjah that aid groups said had also served local clinics.

The civilian picture in and around Hodeidah, the country’s principal grain port, has darkened sharply. Mercy Corps regional director Hala Mansour said her teams had registered roughly 71,000 newly displaced people in the surrounding governorate over the past three weeks, on top of populations who had been displaced once or twice already during a decade of war. Families were arriving on foot and by minibus at three camps north of the city, she said, with most carrying only a single bundle and many separated from elderly relatives left behind.

“We met a grandmother yesterday who walked sixteen kilometers with two grandchildren,” Mansour said. “Her son was at the launch site that was hit. We do not know if he is alive. She arrived at the camp with no shoes and a kettle. That is the situation we are managing.”

The water system, never robust, has been the first to give. The Hayma treatment plant outside Hodeidah, which serves an estimated 380,000 people across the city’s eastern districts and three nearby camps, has been operating on diesel generators since a substation feeding it was knocked offline by a March 27 strike that the U.S. military said had targeted an adjacent Houthi radar installation. The Al-Marawi’ah plant, smaller but critical to the agricultural plain to the east, has been running at less than 40 percent capacity for the past nine days. Both, plant managers told aid coordinators, would exhaust fuel reserves by the middle of next week without resupply.

Fuel itself has become a focal point of the humanitarian operation. The Houthi authorities in Sanaa have imposed rationing on diesel and cooking gas across territory under their control, prioritizing what the group’s deputy minister of water, Yahya Al-Mutawakkil, described in a Saturday statement as “the survival functions” of hospitals, water systems and bakeries. Coalition restrictions on certain categories of imports through Hodeidah, eased late last year, have been tightened informally since the March escalation, according to two shipping officials who asked not to be named because they continued to operate vessels in the Red Sea corridor. Tanker arrivals at Hodeidah in March, the officials said, fell to roughly a third of February’s volume.

“The mechanism on paper is the same as it was a month ago,” said Anders Holm, the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, speaking from Amman. “The reality at the buoy line is different. Inspections are taking longer, insurers are pulling back, and the ships that do come are not always carrying the right mix. We are short of chlorine, we are short of cholera bed kits, and we are short of intravenous fluids.”

The cholera resurgence has hit children hardest. Save the Children, in a Saturday statement from Sanaa, said pediatric admissions for severe dehydration at three of the four hospitals it supports in Hodeidah governorate had tripled since mid-March. The agency’s country director, Faten Al-Hakimi, said the response was being slowed by gaps in oral rehydration salts and by power cuts that had taken cold-chain capacity offline at two district pharmacies.

“Children are dying from a disease we know how to treat with a sachet of sugar and salt,” Al-Hakimi said. “There is no excuse for that in 2026. There would not be an excuse for it in 1996.”

Inside Sanaa, the humanitarian picture has been compounded by economic shock. The Yemeni rial, already battered by a decade of conflict and a banking dispute between rival monetary authorities in Aden and Sanaa, has weakened a further 14 percent against the dollar over the past month, eroding household purchasing power in markets where wheat, sugar and cooking oil prices have climbed even faster than the headline rate. Wheat-flour prices in Hodeidah city, according to a WFP market monitor circulated Friday, were 38 percent higher than at the start of March; cooking gas, 51 percent higher.

“The war that began over Iran is being paid for by Yemenis who have been paying already,” said Faisal Al-Daylami, an independent Yemen analyst based in Amman who tracks displacement and market data. “The Houthi leadership made a political decision to join the fight. The bill is landing on families that did not.”

Saudi and Emirati officials have pledged additional aid through the Saudi Red Crescent — part of the $220 million package announced last week and now being routed in tranches — and the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre on Saturday said an airlift of cholera bed kits and chlorination supplies was being prepared from Riyadh, with the first flights expected to land in Aden on Sunday. From Aden, the supplies would need to move overland through front lines, a logistics challenge that has tripped up earlier consignments.

In Geneva, the United Nations on Saturday raised the Yemen component of its broader regional flash appeal by $310 million, to a total of $740 million, and warned donors that the cholera curve, the displacement curve and the food curve were now reinforcing one another. UN humanitarian chief Catalina Reyes said she would convene a Yemen-specific donor pledging session in Geneva on Wednesday.

“We have asked donors for many things over many years,” Reyes said. “This week we are asking them to keep a water plant running.”

UN officials said updated figures on cholera incidence and on the fuel position at the two key water plants would be released on Tuesday.