Jane Ferguson:

Every day, she says she sees these sorts of cases. People have lost work. Therefore, they have no money. Therefore, there's just no food in the house.

You were never supposed to see these images of Maimona. A blockade of rebel-held Northern Yemen stops reporters from getting here. Journalists are not allowed on flights into the area. No cameras, no pictures.

The only way into rebel-held Yemen is to smuggle yourself in. And for me, that means being dressed entirely as a Yemeni woman with a full-face veil just to get through the checkpoints.

I traveled across the embattled front lines to see what's actually happening inside what the United Nations is calling the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

The Houthis cautiously welcomed me in and, once I was there, watched me closely.

The hunger here and this human catastrophe is entirely manmade. Yemen was already one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, and the war has pushed an already needy people to the brink of famine.

In the midst of political chaos in Yemen after the Arab Spring, Houthi rebels from the north captured the capital, Sanaa, in 2014, before sweeping south and causing the country's then president to flee. Neighboring Sunni, Saudi Arabia, views the Houthis, from a Yemeni sect close to Shia Islam and backed by rival Iran, as an unacceptable threat along their border.

So it formed a military coalition of countries in 2015, determined to defeat the Houthis and reinstate the old president. Crucial military support for the campaign is provided by the United States, a longtime ally of Saudi Arabia.

After three years of aerial bombardment and fighting on the ground, the coalition has so far failed to dislodge the rebels. What the campaign has done is devastate the economy, leaving two-thirds of the population relying on food aid for survival, and over eight million people on the brink of starvation.

I traveled across this country to see for myself what that looks like. Since ancient times, Yemenis have lived securely in villages perched high up on mountaintops. But now they can't hold off the hunger, like in Rafeah village.

Because most of the people in these areas are so desperately poor, they cannot afford to transport their children into the towns to the hospitals whenever their malnutrition gets so bad their lives are in danger. And so many of the worst cases are in small villages scattered all around these mountain ranges just like this.

Hannah and her little brother Ali are frighteningly thin. Their grandma tells me food prices shot up beyond their reach when the fighting started.