The streets of Hodeidah were said to be empty yesterday. For those who live in Yemen’s main port city, the Eid holiday marking the end of the Ramadan fast brings no festivities only a sense of foreboding.

It’s hard to imagine the humanitarian disaster in Yemen getting any worse than it already is, but most likely that is what is about to happen.

Just pause and consider these terrifying facts. Right now around 22 million people in Yemen, about three quarters of the population, are dependent on food aid and 8.4 million of these people remain on the brink of famine.

The vast majority of that food aid comes through the port of Hodeidah. At this moment though, opposing forces in Yemen’s under-reported conflict are engaging in a battle that almost certainly will shut down this crucial conduit and in so doing could trigger a famine imperilling millions of lives.

“It is the lifeline of the country,” said Lise Grande, the top UN humanitarian official in Yemen this week. “If you cut that port off, we have a catastrophe on our hands,” she added, warning that as many as 250,000 Yemenis could die of violence, hunger and illness if there’s a prolonged siege in the city.

Over the past few days the United Nations (UN) Security Council struggled but failed to find a diplomatic path to head off the assault on the city by a coalition of forces from Arab states led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

While Sweden introduced a proposal to the council calling for a ceasefire to be implemented both the UK and US as well as France voiced opposition to the move.

That opposition to a ceasefire one suspects is based on the notion that the UK, US and France, see the risk of exacerbating the humanitarian crisis as one worth taking if the Saudi led coalition are able to oust the rebel Houthi forces who are currently in control of Hodeidah.

If that proves to be the case then it will only add to the clamour of accusations that the UK is happy to side with the Gulf states, not least too because of British business and commercial ties.

Among these links of course are the UK’s licensing of £4.6 billion worth of arms to the Saudi regime since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015.

This is a conflict though whose roots go back a few years earlier than that to the Arab Spring of 2011, when an uprising forced Yemen’s long-time authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to hand over power to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

That political transition was supposed to bring stability to Yemen, but President Hadi struggled to deal with myriad problems including corruption, food insecurity and mounting militant attacks by Houthi rebels.

Backed by Iran, the Houthis are Shiite Muslims in a majority Sunni country, and by

2014 they began to take advantage of President Hadi’s vulnerability seizing control of northern Saada province and neighbouring areas. The Houthis then went on to take the capital Sanaa, forcing Mr Hadi into exile abroad.

By 2015 though things had really ratcheted up. Saudi Arabia and eight other mostly Sunni Arab states - backed by the US, UK, and France - began air strikes against the Houthis, with the declared aim of restoring the Hadi government.

Since then the coalition of Arab states has battled to defeat the Houthis, who control not only the capital Sanaa, but also the main port at Hodeidah and most of the country’s other populated areas.

Throughout that time Yemen’s civilian population has borne the brunt of the conflict not least from Saudi-led airstrikes many carried out using weapons systems supplied to Riyadh by the UK government.

The human cost in that time has been appalling. Few doubt that the impending battle for Hodeidah will be any less so, not least because it will be the coalition’s first attempt to capture such a well-defended major city.

Yemen experts have already highlighted the scale of the task in recapturing Hodeidah,

where around 2,000 Houthi fighters sit among 700,000 locals and face 25,000 advancing coalition and Yemeni forces.

Far and away though it’s the fears of further worsening Yemen’s already dire humanitarian crisis that occupies most minds right now. Even before the current conflict Yemen was already the Middle East’s poorest country. But last year alone as a consequence of the fighting some 500,000 children died of hunger and related causes in the country according to the humanitarian group Save the Children.

One million people in Yemen also have cholera, the world’s largest such epidemic in half a century. What began too as a trickle of refugees and displaced people fleeing the fighting has grown to more than 140,000, with hundreds more abandoning their homes each day.

In all of this there’s simply no escaping the fact that in supplying its Arab coalition allies with weapons systems, intelligence, refuelling and munitions, the US and UK will be complicit if the result is the starvation and epidemics aid officials warn could further grip Yemen.

So far the diplomatic appeals have fallen on deaf ears and a full-blown famine that would be man-made threatens.

Decades after publishing his influential book ‘Famine Crimes,’ Alex de Waal executive director of the World Peace Foundation, has written extensively on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and this week highlighted the stark reality of what the world might be witnessing unfolding there.

“If mass starvation takes hold in Yemen, expect an even more deeply divided country. Expect radicalisation. Expect an exodus across the Arabian Peninsula and up the Red Sea, toward the Mediterranean Sea and Europe. Expect to see the ugly and perilous repercussions of this harrowing experience for years to come,” warned Mr de Waal.

What he outlines is a harrowing prospect for an already harrowing situation. Only the coming days and weeks in Hodeidah will tell whether such a bleak scenario will befall the already long-suffering people of Yemen.