HODEIDAH, Yemen — The first chartered relief vessel since the Iran-Israel ceasefire took effect cleared Hodeidah’s outer roadstead at dawn Tuesday and began offloading wheat, medical kits and water-treatment chemicals at the port’s central berth, marking the formal reopening of Yemen’s principal humanitarian gateway and underscoring the scale of a coastal emergency that aid officials now describe as eclipsing the more visible refugee returns underway along the Iran-Iraq frontier.

The 22,000-ton bulk carrier Asma, chartered by the World Food Programme and inspected at sea by U.N. Verification and Inspection Mechanism monitors over the weekend, docked at 6:42 a.m. local time, according to the port authority. Crews began unloading 14,400 metric tons of wheat flour, 280 pallets of medical supplies and a consignment of chlorine tablets and pump parts that aid officials said would be essential to restarting urban water systems in Hodeidah and the inland city of Bajil before the heat of the Yemeni summer set in.

“This is the first ship, not the last ship, and it is roughly a month later than it should have been,” said Dr. Faisal al-Sharjabi, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, in a briefing to reporters on the dockside. “We have a coastline that absorbed strikes, displacement, fuel shortages and a near-total interruption of import flows in a country that was already feeding itself almost entirely through this port. Tuesday is a beginning. It is not a recovery.”

U.N. agencies on Monday released revised displacement figures that for the first time placed Yemen’s coastal displacement — concentrated in al-Hudaydah governorate and the Tihama lowlands — at roughly 1.1 million people, a number that now equals the entire combined displacement inside Iran and Iraq from the six-week war. The bulk of those displaced moved inland from coastal districts during U.S. retaliatory strikes against Houthi missile and drone positions in late March and early April, and the great majority remain housed with extended family in inland villages where food and water are already strained.

Hodeidah’s port suffered limited direct damage during the war — strikes targeted Houthi-controlled missile facilities and fuel-handling infrastructure rather than the grain terminals themselves — but the disruption to shipping was severe. Lloyd’s List Intelligence said the port handled no commercial vessels between March 6 and April 17, the longest interruption since the worst phase of the pre-war blockade. Two cranes at the southern berth were damaged in a March 24 strike on an adjacent fuel depot and remain out of service.

“The cranes are a real problem and they are not a quick problem,” said Anders Lindgren, the International Committee of the Red Cross regional head of operations, who arrived in Hodeidah on Friday with the agency’s initial assessment team. “We can offload bulk grain with a single working crane at reduced speed. We cannot offload heavy equipment, vehicles or containerized medical infrastructure without the second crane. That is a six-to-eight-week procurement and installation problem at best.”

Cholera surveillance, suspended in coastal districts during the strikes, resumed Sunday and has already identified three suspected outbreaks in inland villages that absorbed displaced populations, the World Health Organization said in a statement Tuesday. Dr. Layla al-Eryani, the WHO’s emergency lead for Yemen, said the agency was racing to restart oral rehydration distribution and chlorination of communal water points before the seasonal rise in cases that typically begins in May.

“We have been here before,” al-Eryani said by phone from Sana’a. “We know what a Yemeni cholera season looks like when the water systems are intact. We do not yet know what one looks like when the pumping stations on the Tihama plain have been running on diesel rations for six weeks.”

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said its $1.8 billion flash appeal, issued Friday and covering Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon, had drawn pledges totaling roughly $640 million by Monday evening, with the European Union, Japan and Canada confirming initial commitments and Gulf donors largely directing their funds through bilateral channels. OCHA officials said the Yemen component of the appeal — $720 million, the largest single-country share — remained the least covered, with formal pledges totaling under 30 percent of the request.

The funding gap reflects what humanitarian officials described as a familiar pattern, in which Yemen’s chronic crisis status makes new appeals harder to fund than emergencies tied to discrete events. “Donor fatigue is a real phenomenon and it is not a moral failing of donors, it is a function of how attention works,” said Anne-Marie Larsson, a Stockholm-based humanitarian financing analyst with the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The Iran-Iraq corridor produced televised images of families crossing borders. Yemen’s displacement happened in places where cameras were not. The funding gap will track that visibility gap unless the political case is made very deliberately.”

Inside Yemen, the Houthi-aligned administration in Sana’a issued a statement Tuesday welcoming the Asma’s arrival and pledging “full facilitation” of further aid shipments through the port, language that monitoring officials interpreted as a deliberate signal of compliance with the inspection regime that the U.N. Verification and Inspection Mechanism continues to operate from Djibouti. A spokesman for the mechanism said five additional vessels were currently in the inspection queue and would clear for Hodeidah in staggered arrivals through the end of the week.

In the village of Bayt al-Faqih, roughly 90 kilometers inland from Hodeidah, a school administrator named Saleh Mansour said his classrooms had been hosting four displaced families from the coast since the third week of March and that families were beginning to ask whether they could return. “They want to go home,” Mansour said by phone. “We tell them, wait. The ships are coming. When the ships are coming, the markets come back. When the markets come back, you go home. But for now, stay with us.”

The U.N. assessment mission for coastal Yemen is expected to complete its initial sweep by the end of the week and to issue formal guidance on safe-return corridors for Hodeidah governorate by April 28, officials said, with phased returns from inland host communities likely to begin in early May if water and food distribution systems can be re-established at scale.