Taiz families face hunger as gas, fuel, medicine run out

In Taiz, the cooking gas has run out. Food prices have climbed fivefold, according to a local office tracking the siege of the city, and the twelve hospitals still standing have fuel for only four more days. The World Health Organization says surgical supplies are gone, oxygen and medicines are critically scarce, and the city is battling a cholera outbreak at the same time. For the families living through it, the war in Yemen is no longer an abstraction. It is the empty shelf, the darkened clinic, the route blocked at the city’s western entrance by Houthi forces.

Al Jazeera’s Hadeel al-Yamani, reporting from Taiz, described dwindling food stocks and severed supply lines. About 121,000 of the more than 233,000 Yemenis uprooted by the latest fighting are in Taiz province, according to the International Organization for Migration, the UN’s migration agency. Behind those figures are households deciding each day how to stretch shrinking supplies while the fighting closes in.

It is against that backdrop that the Gulf Cooperation Council issued its condemnation on Sunday. The six-member bloc, which groups Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, denounced repeated attacks by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi fighters on Saudi Arabia and pledged support for the kingdom. Meeting in Manama, Bahrain, the GCC foreign ministers declared that an attack on any member affected all six, invoking a joint defence agreement and backing Saudi Arabia’s right to protect itself.

The ministers accused the Houthis of deadly strikes on civilian airports and vital facilities, pressed for tighter enforcement of a UN arms embargo against the group, and urged countries to formally designate it a terrorist organisation. They also welcomed an October 15 statement from the UN Security Council condemning Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia and threats to Red Sea shipping.

The statement came hours after the Saudi-led military coalition reported shooting down two drones near Riyadh and in the kingdom’s Eastern Province early on Sunday. The coalition said another drone had been intercepted near the capital hours earlier, though it did not identify who launched it.

Yemen’s internationally recognised government, for its part, appealed directly to the Security Council to act against Houthi attacks on homes and state facilities. In letters addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and to Aglaia Balta, the council’s president for October, the government cited an attack on the presidential palace in Aden, where it is temporarily based.

Diplomacy ran alongside military movement. On Sunday, UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan met Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud in Abu Dhabi to discuss regional security, the UAE’s state news agency WAM reported. Meanwhile, Saudi-backed government forces pressed offensives on several fronts. Yemen’s military said the Houthis fired missiles towards the central city of Marib on Sunday, while government troops reported gains in Taiz, further south. Government-aligned commanders said eight soldiers died in fighting in Lahij province on Saturday, and government forces claimed to have killed 12 Houthi fighters in southern Taiz, figures that could not be independently confirmed.

This latest phase of the war followed Houthi gains along Yemen’s Red Sea coast last month, which prompted a government counteroffensive intended to recapture territory from the group that seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014.

For the people of Taiz, however, the manoeuvres on the map translate into something far more immediate: a city running out of fuel, medicine and food, and hospitals counting down the days until even the generators fall silent.