UK ambassador calls on Houthis to lift Taiz siege and allow aid in
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — Britain’s ambassador to Yemen has called on the Houthis to lift their siege of Taiz and let aid and civilians through, she said on Thursday.
Abda Sharif said a month had passed since the siege of the city began, and that residents still faced shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
She asked that essential supplies and humanitarian aid be allowed to reach people in need, and that civilians be able to move safely.
The remarks were made in a post on the X platform, according to regional media reports. Yemen Herald has seen no statement from the British Embassy confirming them, and no independent confirmation of the remarks has been published. The account rests on those reports of the ambassador’s own post.
Sharif also spoke the same day with the governor of Taiz, Nabil al-Shamsan, according to the same reports, which did not describe what was discussed.
Sharif is a lawyer and diplomat, Arab News reported when her appointment was announced.
United Nations agencies have described the city as cut off. Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN aid coordination office, said access roads had been cut.
“It’s 20 days and counting since Taiz has been cut off,” Laerke told a news conference in Geneva on Oct. 23.
He said it was “impossible for us to get in and impossible for people to get out.” Very little fuel, food or other supplies had reached the city since the closure, he said.
“It comes with a time code: The clock is running out,” Laerke said.
Taiz has been encircled by Houthi forces fighting government troops, UN News reported. Al Jazeera reported that the encirclement had held since early October, cutting the road that links the city to Aden.
The World Food Programme said more than 800,000 people in Taiz had been cut off from assistance. It said 600,000 of them depend on humanitarian aid, and that 200,000 are women and children.
In a statement on Oct. 14 the agency said wheat flour stocks were nearly exhausted.
“We’re desperately trying to regain access to Taiz, and we continue to support the broader operations across Yemen,” said Azfar Deen, a WFP regional communications officer.
Laerke said most people in the city depend on water delivered by truck. He said water production had fallen by about half and that the cost of trucked water had roughly tripled.
Diesel to run the trucks was scarce, he said.
Laurent Bukera, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said on Oct. 20 that water production in Taiz had been halved and that alternatives were running out. He said the city’s health system was close to collapse.
Hospitals in the province have reported shortages of fuel, oxygen, medicine and supplies, Al Jazeera reported.
UNICEF said more than 168,000 children had been screened in Taiz this year. More than 52,000 were acutely malnourished and more than 11,500 had severe acute malnutrition, the agency said.
Akhil Iyer, UNICEF’s country representative in Yemen, said the cost of trucked water had tripled since the escalation began, and that diesel shortages threatened to halt water pumps.
The agency said nearly 8,000 cartons of ready-to-use therapeutic food had been pre-positioned, enough to sustain services for about three months.
Human Rights Watch said on Oct. 29 that Houthi forces had blocked access to all the main roads connecting Taiz to the rest of the country, and that the road linking Taiz to Aden was the most important of them.
The group said Houthi forces attacked the remaining main supply route, in a separate report it published on Oct. 26.
Human Rights Watch said it interviewed 15 people in October, among them five city residents, four doctors and six civil society workers.
Doctors told the group that anaesthesia and medicine stocks were low and that oxygen was short. One said a facility stopped working for three days when its diesel ran out.
A resident who runs an aid organisation said the price of cooking gas had risen by about 400 percent, the group reported.
“The Houthis cannot use the siege of Taizz to justify the humanitarian catastrophe they are causing civilians,” said Niku Jafarnia, the group’s Yemen and Bahrain researcher.
Jafarnia said the Houthis “have bombed, starved, and denied humanitarian aid to a million residents of the city.”
A Houthi spokesperson told Human Rights Watch on Oct. 21 that Yemeni government forces, not Houthi forces, were blocking roads into the city. The group said residents, civil society workers and UN officials attributed the closures to the Houthis.
The International Organization for Migration recorded about 258,679 people displaced between June 7 and Oct. 19, most of them in Taiz and Lahj governorates.
Accounts of when the current escalation began differ. UN News said it started in early September, ending the relative calm produced by a truce agreed in 2022. Al Jazeera said the truce fell apart in July.
Human Rights Watch said Houthi forces have surrounded Taiz since 2015, and that movement restrictions have applied for 11 years.
The European Commission allocated an additional 22.5 million euros for Yemen, adding to 87.5 million euros allocated for 2026.
As of Oct. 17, 3,836 Yemeni nationals had arrived in Djibouti, the UN said.
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