Taiz Is in Famine as Saudi Airstrike Kills 13 in Yemen
Taiz is no longer approaching famine. It is living through one. That was the blunt assessment delivered Thursday by the governor of Yemen’s besieged third-largest city, as a Saudi airstrike elsewhere in the province killed at least 13 people and the country’s renewed war tightened its grip on civilians.
“The city is in famine, not on the brink of it,” Gov. Nabil Shamsan told reporters on October 29 from a position about a mile from the front line. His declaration turned weeks of warnings into a political indictment: armed forces have cut a city of roughly one million people off from food, water, cooking gas and medical oxygen.
Photo source and license — CSSW Yemen / CC BY-SA 4.0.
Houthi forces fully encircled Taiz this month, according to Human Rights Watch, and attacked the remaining major supply route. The World Food Programme says it and its partners cannot reach more than 600,000 people in Taiz who depend on humanitarian assistance, including more than 200,000 women and children. Wheat flour stocks are nearly exhausted. Whatever remains in local markets will not last if the roads stay closed.
The siege has stripped ordinary life down to survival. Shamsan said Houthi forces seized the city’s last outside water source, leaving Taiz with only a fraction of what it needs. Cooking gas has disappeared. Restaurants have shut. Families burn wood. Hospitals are close to running out of the oxygen that keeps intensive-care patients and newborns alive.
Thursday also brought another blow. Yemen’s Houthi-run health ministry said a Saudi airstrike in western Taiz killed at least 13 people. The same civilians trapped by a Houthi siege now face Saudi bombs from above. Yemen’s war again exposes the fraud of every side claiming to protect the population while making civilian life impossible.
Shamsan said 271 people have been killed and 1,129 wounded since the offensive began earlier in October. Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi rejected the siege allegation as a Saudi fabrication. “As far as food and humanitarian needs are concerned, the way is open,” he said in a televised speech, arguing that his forces were blocking weapons rather than relief.
Photo source and license — CSSW Yemen / CC BY-SA 4.0.
The evidence from aid agencies points the other way. Human Rights Watch said the encirclement may amount to the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare. The United Nations warned that blocked roads and insecurity are stopping fuel and other essential supplies from entering Taiz. Prices have more than doubled, water production has been cut in half and the health system is close to collapse.
Reuters reported Thursday that hospitals are treating a surge of war wounded while lacking medicine, anesthetic, gloves, fuel and oxygen. Some frontline facilities have admitted more than 700 wounded people in a single week, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Maternity wards are becoming emergency rooms. Community midwives cannot move safely. Strikes have damaged hospitals and ambulances, including an attack that killed an ambulance driver and a paramedic.
This is not a natural disaster. Taiz’s hunger has been produced by military decisions: to encircle roads, bomb territory, fire on medical transport and treat food, water and fuel as instruments of coercion. International patrons keep the war supplied with weapons while relief agencies count the sacks of flour and litres of oxygen left inside the city.
Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, when the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and drove the internationally recognized government into exile. Saudi Arabia intervened the following year. More than a decade later, the alliances have shifted and the front lines have moved, but civilians still pay for every escalation.
Taiz needs open roads, an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure and immediate access for food, water, fuel and medicine. Anything less accepts famine as a battlefield tactic. Thursday’s declaration should end the language of warning. The catastrophe is already here.
Sources
Hero photograph — City of Taiz by Rod Waddington / CC BY-SA 2.0.
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