Arab League and G7 demand Taiz aid access as UN reports 250,000 cut off from healthcare

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CAIRO, Egypt — The Arab League and the Group of Seven separately demanded humanitarian access to Yemen’s city of Taiz on Thursday, as the United Nations reported its hospitals failing.

Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Fahmy called for the immediate lifting of restrictions on aid and essential supplies to the city, and for safe passage for patients and medical staff, Xinhua reported.

“Depriving civilians of medical care and humanitarian assistance is unacceptable,” Fahmy said, according to the Chinese state news agency.

The statement was issued by the Arab League’s press office, the independent outlet Yemen Monitor reported.

Accounts of it differ on one point. Yemen Monitor and Yemen’s state news agency Saba both said Fahmy demanded the lifting of restrictions imposed by the Houthis.

Xinhua said only that he held the Houthis responsible for the humanitarian consequences of the restrictions, without naming them as the party imposing them.

All three reported that he called for investigations and accountability over the obstruction of aid.

Fahmy took office in July, succeeding Ahmed Aboul Gheit. Arab governments named him by consensus in March.

Hospitals in Taiz face shortages of fuel, oxygen, medicines and medical supplies, the three accounts said, including for incubators used for premature and newborn babies.

G7 foreign ministers meeting in Paris demanded the urgent opening of a humanitarian corridor in Taiz the same day, Yemen Monitor reported.

They sought the immediate and unconditional release of all humanitarian workers held by the Houthis, which their statement put at about 70 United Nations staff, the outlet said.

The ministers called on the Houthis to halt all military action and threats, and called on Iran to stop supplying them with weapons, according to the same report.

The demands follow six weeks of UN warnings about the city.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Nov. 2 that nearly 250,000 people in Taiz had lost access to essential healthcare, among them more than 186,000 children under five and 23,000 pregnant women.

Twelve hospitals were at risk of closing or had already cut services for want of fuel and supplies, he said.

More than 1,400 cases of acute diarrhoea and suspected cholera were recorded in a single week, Dujarric said.

“All roads into the city are now closed due to the fighting, and no commercial supplies are getting through,” he told reporters in New York.

Dujarric named no party as responsible for the closures.

Tom Fletcher, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said the same day that nearly 300,000 people had been displaced since early August.

The World Health Organization reported 27 health facilities and seven ambulances damaged or destroyed across Yemen since August, and six health workers killed, Xinhua reported on Nov. 3.

Deliveries at Taiz city’s main maternity hospital had halved, from about 10 a day to five, the UN Population Fund said. Working incubators for premature babies fell from 40 to 10 as fuel ran short.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said cholera cases had fallen for a third consecutive week.

At least 70 UN staff and dozens of other aid workers remain detained, OCHA said.

Laurent Bukera, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said on Oct. 20 that water production in the city had halved and its health system was “close to collapse”.

OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said on Oct. 23 it had been “20 days and counting since Taiz has been cut off”.

The Houthis reject that account. A Houthi spokesperson told Human Rights Watch on Oct. 21 that Yemeni government forces, not Houthi forces, were blocking the roads.

The group held to that position this week, denying responsibility for the closures and blaming government forces, Al Jazeera reported on Saturday.

Human Rights Watch said on Oct. 29 that the siege may amount to the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare.

“The Houthis cannot use the siege of Taizz to justify the humanitarian catastrophe they are causing civilians,” said Niku Jafarnia, its Yemen and Bahrain researcher.

Estimates of how many people are affected diverge. Jafarnia put it at a million residents of the city, while Yemen’s government says the Houthis have tightened a siege on nearly two million.

The World Food Programme said on Oct. 14 it could not reach more than 600,000 people in Taiz who depend on aid, and that wheat flour stocks were nearly exhausted.

Houthi forces advanced around the city in early October and cut off the last remaining supply route into government-held districts, Al Jazeera reported.

The Houthis have surrounded Taiz since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch.

Taiz’s public health office recorded 5,642 cases over the most recent four weeks, Al Jazeera reported — 5,228 of acute watery diarrhoea, 232 of suspected dengue and 182 of suspected cholera.

Yasin Abdulmalik, who directs the office’s epidemiological surveillance department, said more than twice that number could not reach a health facility.

Taysir al-Samiei, a health communications official there, put the fall in patients’ ability to reach hospitals at 60 to 70 percent by the end of the siege’s second week.

Fares al-Absi, a consultant in diabetes and endocrinology, said about 8 percent of the city’s water needs are being met.

OCHA said it and health partners are coordinating a 90-day emergency plan. It counted 5.2 million Yemenis uprooted before the current escalation, in a country of about 42 million.