SANAA — More than 1.6 million Yemenis lost access to running water or grid electricity in the 72 hours since Israeli aircraft began striking Houthi launch sites and command nodes north of the capital, aid agencies said Tuesday, warning that the country’s already brittle public-health system could not absorb another wave of damage without producing mass civilian harm.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Food Programme and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released near-simultaneous assessments describing a sharp deterioration in basic services across Sanaa, Saada and the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, where strikes over the weekend severed feeder lines from the Marib gas-to-power facility and damaged a transformer yard that fed three desalination plants.

“This is the second-poorest country in the region being asked to absorb a third war while still trying to recover from the first two,” said Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, speaking to reporters from Amman. “Our people on the ground are describing scenes they last saw in 2017. Children carrying jerry cans through neighborhoods that had water on Friday and do not have it today.”

The strikes followed the Houthi movement’s decision late last week to enter the month-old war between Iran and a U.S.-Israeli coalition, launching a ballistic missile toward Israel that was intercepted by Israeli and Saudi air defenses. Israeli aircraft, operating out of Negev bases and refueling over the Red Sea, responded Sunday with a wave of strikes that the Israel Defense Forces said targeted launchers, drone production lines and a coastal radar installation. Houthi-run health authorities in Sanaa said at least 84 civilians had been killed and more than 300 wounded since Saturday, figures that international monitors said were broadly consistent with their own initial casualty tracking but had not been independently verified.

In Hodeidah, residents described a city largely without power and increasingly without potable water. Mohammed al-Shami, a 44-year-old fisherman who lives near the port, said he had walked nearly two kilometers Tuesday morning to fill containers at a mosque cistern that was being rationed by neighborhood committees.

“My daughter has asthma and the nebulizer needs power,” al-Shami said in a phone call relayed by an ICRC field officer. “The generator at the clinic ran out of diesel yesterday. We are praying for the wind to change, because that is the only thing left to pray for.”

Aid agencies said the timing was particularly dangerous because Yemen’s annual cholera surveillance season was already underway. The WHO’s Yemen office said three suspect cholera cases had been logged in a Hodeidah neighborhood served by one of the disabled desalination plants, and that a rapid-response team had been dispatched to investigate. A spokesman for the agency, Tarik Jasarevic, cautioned that the cases had not been confirmed but said the conditions on the ground were “textbook” for an outbreak: damaged water infrastructure, hot weather, and a population whose immunity had been eroded by two years of intermittent disease activity.

The WFP separately said it had been forced to suspend food distributions in four of its 22 active districts after fuel deliveries were halted along the Hodeidah-Sanaa corridor. Country director Richard Ragan said the agency had roughly 17 days of pre-positioned stocks in Sanaa warehouses but that those reserves could not be replenished without a functioning port and a reliable trucking route.

“We are not running out of food tomorrow,” Ragan said. “We are running out of food in three weeks if nothing changes. And if there is one thing this region has shown us, it is that three weeks goes quickly.”

Houthi authorities in Sanaa, speaking through the group’s political bureau, said the strikes had targeted civilian infrastructure deliberately and accused the United States of providing intelligence support for the Israeli operation. A senior U.S. defense official, briefing reporters at the Pentagon on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said American forces had not participated in the weekend strikes but had been “in routine deconfliction” with Israeli counterparts, a formulation aid groups have heard before and that several said offered little reassurance to civilians under the bombs.

The humanitarian crisis is also rippling outward. Save the Children’s regional director, Janti Soeripto, said the agency was tracking an early uptick in attempted maritime crossings from the Yemeni coast toward Djibouti, with the Bab el-Mandeb strait — itself a focus of Houthi and naval activity — now also serving as an exit route for civilians. The International Organization for Migration in Djibouti said it had logged 1,184 arrivals over the prior 48 hours, more than triple the rate from earlier in March, and that reception facilities in Obock were filling rapidly.

In Geneva, the U.N. announcement built on Monday’s $1.4 billion regional appeal by adding a separate $480 million Yemen line item, which OCHA said reflected both the new emergency caseload and the underlying chronic crisis that predated the war. Donor responses were mixed. A senior European Commission humanitarian official, Janez Lenarcic, said the EU was prepared to advance roughly 90 million euros from existing 2026 envelopes but acknowledged that several member states had become “appeal-fatigued” amid competing demands from Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan.

Saudi officials, who lead the long-standing coalition that opposed the Houthis through 2022 and have since pursued a fragile detente, said the kingdom was prepared to facilitate the movement of humanitarian shipments through its territory and to expedite visa processing for medical evacuations, according to a statement from the Saudi Development and Reconstruction Program for Yemen. The statement notably did not address the question of whether Riyadh had been notified in advance of the Israeli strikes — a question Saudi officials have so far declined to answer publicly.

Inside Yemen, aid workers said the most urgent immediate need was fuel for hospital generators. Doctors Without Borders’ head of mission in Sanaa, Caroline Seguin, said three facilities her organization supported had moved to triage protocols, prioritizing surgical cases over routine care and asking families to bring linens and supplies from home.

“We have done this before in Yemen,” Seguin said. “We did not expect to be doing it again this week.”

The U.N. said it would convene an emergency donor call later this week and that a joint statement from the secretaries-general of the U.N., the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League was being drafted. Officials said additional measures, including a possible request for protected humanitarian access corridors through the Red Sea, would be raised at the Islamabad talks in the coming days.