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Aid agencies and medical staff on the ground in Hodeidah have begged the international community to intervene to stop the violence in the besieged Yemeni city, as coalition and Houthi rebel forces struggle to gain the upper hand ahead of a planned ceasefire at the end of the month.
“The violence is unbearable, I cannot tell you. We’re surrounded by strikes from the air, sea and land,” said Wafa Abdullah Saleh, a nurse at the barely functioning al-Olafi hospital in the Houthi-controlled city centre.
“The hospital treats the hungry and people injured in airstrikes day in and day out, but there is a serious shortage of medicine,” she said. “Even if we try our hardest we cannot treat patients because we lack the necessities for basic operations.”
Yemeni pro-government forces advance into rebel-held Hodeida. Photograph: Nabil Hbadan/AFP/Getty Images
Hodeidah, a large and cosmopolitan city on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, was seized by Yemen’s Houthi rebels early on in the three-year-old war. More than 80% of the country’s food, aid, fuel and commercial goods enter the country through the city’s port.
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates-led military coalition attempts to retake the city from the rebels have been delayed after UN and aid agency warnings that any damage to the port facilities could plunge Yemen – where three-quarters of the 28 million population are now reliant on aid to survive – into full-blown famine.
Fighting restarted in earnest last week, however, after US calls for a ceasefire at the end of November, as pro-government militias aim to seize as much ground as possible before hostilities are supposed to stop.
There have been at least 200 airstrikes, many on civilian neighbourhoods, and at least 150 people have been killed. Many residents are too poor to afford fuel or safe pbadage out of the city, but even those with the means to do so have been prevented from leaving by Houthi roadblocks on main roads. The pbadage of aid to the rest of the country has also been stalled by the fighting.
The latest violence has centred on eastern neighbourhoods and near a university campus just 4km (2.5 miles) from the vital port. Over the weekend, as first reported by the Guardian, the Houthis stormed the 22 May hospital in Hodeidah’s east, stationing snipers on the roof and panicking patients and staff who were terrified of being targeted in a coalition airstrike.
The nearing fighting has already disrupted services at the hospital, which is one of only two properly functioning facilities left in the city, the Red Cross said.
Appearing in a televised address from the capital, Sana’a, on Wednesday night, the Houthi leader, Abdel Malik al-Houthi, vowed his fighters would not surrender their positions in the key city.
In a joint statement on Thursday, several international aid agencies condemned the intense new violence in Hodeidah, calling it a “deeply disturbing development”, and calling on all parties to the conflict to cease the fighting and engage with the UN-sponsored peace process.
A new round of peace talks to end the war – which has killed an estimated 56,000 people and left 14 million on the brink of starvation – are scheduled for early December in Sweden.
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