Aid group says displaced families in Taiz still lack food, water and medicine
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — A Yemeni aid group said thousands of displaced families still lack food, water and medicine, most of them in Taiz and nearby districts.
The Human Access Organization for Partnership and Development issued the warning on Wednesday.
Abdulwasea al-Wasai, the organisation’s secretary-general, said the families had lost shelter and livelihoods in the fighting.
He said schooling for children had been interrupted, and that access to shelter and health care was limited.
Al-Wasai called on government authorities, humanitarian organisations and donors to coordinate more closely.
He asked them to widen assistance, protect vulnerable groups and restore livelihoods so families could rebuild and support themselves.
The account of the warning rests on a report carried by Saba, the state news agency of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation of the organisation’s assessment. The group published no figures of its own, and its only quantity was the word “thousands.”
Saba did not say where the organisation is based or how it is funded. It gave no detail of the group’s own relief operations.
United Nations figures describe the displacement in more detail.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said almost 260,000 people had been displaced since August. About half had taken refuge in Taiz, where the fighting is concentrated.
Newly displaced families told the office their most pressing need was shelter, followed by food and cash.
Humanitarian partners had reached more than 174,000 displaced people since August, the office said, which it put at nearly six in 10 displaced households.
They provided food, hygiene kits and emergency cash in the first days after displacement, according to the office. The office released its report late on Oct. 21.
The humanitarian affairs office said the aid had been delivered despite what it called extremely difficult conditions.
The U.N. human rights office has verified 251 civilian casualties over the same period. It recorded 57 people killed and 194 injured, and said half of those killed were children.
Yemen’s government has published its own count for Taiz.
Mukhtar Omar Saleh al-Yafei, the social affairs and labour minister, told a news conference in Aden that field monitoring had recorded 19,600 families displaced in the governorate between Aug. 10 and Oct. 15.
That is 135,587 people, including 52,979 children, according to his figures.
Al-Yafei said the same monitoring documented 79 civilian deaths and 206 injuries, along with 494 violations against civilians. Yemen Herald could not independently verify the ministry’s figures.
He put damage to residential buildings at 56. Taiz Governor Nabil Shamsan gave a higher figure, saying shelling had damaged or destroyed about 676 homes.
The government has not reconciled the two counts.
Al-Yafei said services at 12 hospitals and 18 health centres were under threat.
In districts under Houthi control, he said, 120 health facilities had stopped operating and 66 were partly functioning.
That affects care for more than 186,000 children under five and close to 23,000 pregnant women, according to the minister. Twelve educational facilities were damaged, he said.
Al-Yafei asked donors for a wider humanitarian response, saying funding shortfalls had left gaps in essential services. He did not give a figure for what that response would cost.
The Houthis have not responded to the ministry’s account.
The Ministry of Education says more than 2.5 million children are out of school because of the conflict.
The education ministry did not say how many of those children are among the newly displaced.
Displacement has risen across the country since August.
The International Organization for Migration said more than 184,000 people had been forced from their homes since the start of that month, most of them since early September.
In the week to Oct. 3 the agency recorded nearly 21,800 people displaced at least once, a 26% increase on the previous week. A further 6,474 people were displaced on Oct. 4.
“As the conflict intensifies, more and more people are thrown into an appalling cycle of displacement,” said Amy Pope, the agency’s director general.
The relief operation was stretched before the current escalation.
The U.N. humanitarian plan for Yemen published in March estimated that more than 22 million people needed assistance, and put the number of acutely food insecure at 18.3 million.
More than 2.2 million children under five were acutely malnourished, the plan said, of whom 516,157 were severely malnourished.
It recorded 5.2 million internally displaced people and sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million of them.
The ministry’s figures and the United Nations counts cover different areas and different periods, and the two sets cannot be compared directly. The United Nations count covers the whole country; the ministry’s covers Taiz governorate alone.
The current fighting followed the collapse of a truce.
The Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi ports in July, and the United Nations-brokered truce agreed in 2022 broke down the same month.
Government forces launched a counteroffensive they called Dawn of Yemen in early October.
Taiz lies inland from Yemen’s south-western Red Sea coast and has been a front line for a decade. The Houthi-held highlands of Jabal Han overlook areas connecting the city to Aden, the government’s base.
Al-Wasai did not say how many families his organisation had assisted, or over what period. He did not name the districts where it works.
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