Besieged Yemen city faces looming healthcare crisis

Crammed with beds and stretchers, the dilapidated Al Jumhuri hospital in Yemen's besieged city of Taiz is running so low on fuel and medicine that it may have to close, officials warn.

With pro-Iran Houthi fighters surrounding Taiz and blocking all supplies, the facility is symptomatic of a collapsing health system in Yemen's third-largest city, they say.

At Al-Thawra General Hospital, Taiz's biggest, the kidney center is treating 420 patients. But its generators have just 14 days' worth of fuel, its director Youssef al-Zakri said.

"We don't know what will happen to them" after that, he told AFP during a visit this week. Without dialysis, they will die, he warned.

One of the patients, Ahmed al-Issai, needs two treatments a week and never leaves his hospital bed.

"A dialysis patient is like a fish. If it leaves the water, it dies," he told AFP.

Houthi fighters have encircled Taiz since early October, blocking the road that links it to Aden, interim capital of the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized government.

The Houthis, from Yemen's rugged north, seized the capital Sanaa in 2014, sparking a brutal civil war with a Saudi-led coalition fighting for the government.

After a years-long lull, the conflict -- which triggered a major humanitarian crisis -- has flared again during the US-Iran war, impacting Yemen's beleaguered populace once more.

"Most of Taiz's medical facilities are threatened with closure due to the lack of diesel," Ilan Abdulhaq, Taiz's deputy governor in charge of health affairs, told AFP.

She also lamented "a shortage of medicines and medical supplies, which are impossible to find because of the total blockade" on the city's entrances imposed by the Houthis.

Discussions have taken place to set up humanitarian corridors, but "we have received no assurances in this regard", she added.

– Hospitals 'overwhelmed' –

Fadl al-Bukhari, who suffers from a heart condition, says the shortages are increasingly acute.

"The pharmacies say: 'It's not in our hands. There is a blockade, the medicines have not arrived,'" he said.

Across Yemen, hospitals and health facilities are "overwhelmed" by the most intense fighting in years, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned this week.

Clashes in Taiz governorate and along the Red Sea coast left hundreds of fighters dead and displaced more than 100,000 people, according to military sources and the U.N.

"Frontline hospitals are receiving large numbers of wounded people with limited supplies of surgical materials, anesthesia, oxygen and medicines," ICRC health coordinator Feras Abusamra said in a statement.

The World Food Program (WFP) said the renewed fighting has left it unable to reach 600,000 people in Taiz who rely on humanitarian aid, including 200,000 women and children.

Taiz governorate has "some of (Yemen's) highest levels of food insecurity", with 10 of its 16 districts classified at emergency levels, the WFP said this week.

"The latest monitoring indicates that wheat flour stocks are nearly depleted while local markets are running out of food," it said in a statement.

According to the WFP, more than 18 million people -- most of Yemen's population -- are facing severe food insecurity. About 2.2 million children under five suffer from acute malnutrition.

"We are critically concerned about the escalating conflict, but even more so about the growing number of people we can no longer reach because of it," said El-Khidir Daloum, WFP country director in Yemen.

"This is the kind of situation that can rapidly spiral into a humanitarian catastrophe," he added.