Time ‘running out’ to reach Yemen’s Taiz amid deepening crisis, UN says
More than 800,000 people have been cut off from aid since the Houthis encircled Taiz city in early October.
A mounting humanitarian disaster is gripping Yemen’s Taiz after nearly three weeks of a Houthi siege that has prevented supplies from entering the city, the United Nations has warned.
The Iran-backed Houthis have encircled Taiz since early October, cutting off the road that links it to Aden, which serves as the interim capital of Yemen’s internationally recognised government.
“It’s 20 days and counting since Taiz has been cut off,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian arm, OCHA, told a news conference in Geneva on Friday. “We are seeing increasingly that the fighting makes it impossible for us to get in and impossible for people to get out.”
Colonel Majid al-Nuzaili, a spokesperson for the forces of the internationally recognised government, said on Friday that troops had conducted raids and counterattacks in Taiz over the last 24 hours, “neutralising” 620 Houthi fighters and destroying 190 vehicles.