Tigray, Ethiopia – Lately, 88-year-old Nireayo Wubet spends many of his days burying friends and family members. As he grieves, he worries about whether there will be anyone left to offer him a decent burial when the time comes, as severe hunger ravages a large swath of his village in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.“We have little humanitarian support,” laments the octogenarian whose frail appearance is mirrored by many others in his village of Hitsats, near the Eritrean border. “It’s not conflicts that will ultimately kill us, but famine,” he says.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listOnce a proud farmer from Humera – currently a disputed area within the Amhara region – Wubet took shelter in Hitsats four years ago, after fleeing conflicts and ethnic strife that uprooted him and others in the region.He was first displaced in the middle of the Tigray war, which started in 2020, killing thousands of people and displacing millions more. He has not been able to return and reclaim his life even as the conflict ended in 2022.Hitsats is a destitute village that has been sustained mostly by humanitarian organisations, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – once Ethiopia’s largest source of humanitarian aid.But that changed abruptly a year ago when US President Donald Trump took office and promptly demolished the agency’s work and cut funding across the globe.Across Tigray province, humanitarian organisations including the World Food Programme (WFP) say that up to 80 per …
