12 hospitals in Taiz have hours of fuel left, a report says

Houthi forces have cut every main route out of Taiz, leaving food nearly exhausted and 12 hospitals hours from running out of fuel, according to The Jerusalem Post. ^[1]

The October 31 report describes a further tightening of the siege around the government-held city in southwestern Yemen. UN agencies had already documented hundreds of thousands of people beyond the reach of food aid, hospitals short of essential medicines and water production falling by about half. ^[1][2][3][4]

The precise claims that every main route is now cut and that 12 hospitals have only hours of fuel have not been independently confirmed. Current stocks at individual hospitals, any replenishment since earlier warnings and which services have stopped are not known. The World Health Organization said on October 22 that communication outages had hampered updates and that it was working with health authorities to verify fuel stocks and assess disruption. ^[2]

The hospital emergency was already acute on October 20. WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said then that 12 hospitals had approximately four days of fuel remaining. Oxygen cylinders were in daily deficit, while 115 of 127 essential medicines had stocks for about a week or less. ^[6]

The Daily Inference reported on October 22 that hospitals faced shortages of surgical supplies and fuel while fighting had cut hundreds of thousands of people off from food aid. The latest warning puts Taiz's remaining supply routes at the centre of the emergency.

Hospitals need a continuing supply

WHO said on October 22 that 42 health facilities in Taiz city were reporting acute shortages. More than 1,110 people with kidney failure required daily dialysis, 192 patients were in intensive care and 154 newborns were in incubators. Hospitals and ambulances together needed more than 156,000 litres of fuel each month. ^[2]

Those patients depend on services that cannot simply be postponed until a road reopens. WHO warned that fuel shortages threatened oxygen production, emergency transport and the refrigeration needed to keep vaccines usable. Water pumping and sanitation were also at risk. ^[2]

A delivery can buy time. Keeping those services working requires repeated deliveries, at a scale measured in thousands of litres a day.

WHO said a partner had delivered emergency medical supplies to Al-Thawra Hospital using an alternative route. The agency called for safe, sustained access through all available routes. ^[2]

The damaged road that carried flour

Human Rights Watch said roads into and out of Taiz had largely been blocked by Houthi and Yemeni government-affiliated forces because of hostilities since an October 1 attack. Some supplies, including flour, nevertheless continued to arrive along the Hayjat al-Abd road. ^[5]

That route became still harder to use on October 18. According to Human Rights Watch, Houthi forces used explosives at about four a.m. to severely damage a section near al-Turba. The organisation said the road had served as the main entry point for food, medicine and fuel, and that the attack disrupted the remaining major commercial supply route. Its investigation used satellite imagery and verified photographs and video. ^[5]

Human Rights Watch wrote to the Houthis on October 21 about road attacks and received no response. It also examined an earlier attack on the same road, during the night of September 30 to October 1, but said it could not conclusively determine that Houthi forces were responsible for that incident. ^[5]

The organisation said sieges are not automatically unlawful, but parties must allow and facilitate humanitarian relief and may not use civilian starvation as a method of warfare. Whether the October 18 attack constituted a war crime depended in part on its purpose, it said. It did not present that possibility as an established finding. ^[5]

By October 23, the UN humanitarian office's spokesperson Jens Laerke said Taiz had been cut off for 20 days, with very little fuel, food or other supplies reaching the city. Water production had fallen by about half, while the price of trucked water had roughly tripled. ^[4]

Food in storage, families out of reach

The World Food Programme had warned on October 14 that it and its partners could not reach more than 600,000 people in Taiz who depended on humanitarian assistance. That included more than 200,000 women and children. Across Taiz and west-coast communities affected by lost access, 800,000 people were beyond its reach. ^[3]

Wheat flour stocks in Taiz were nearly exhausted, WFP said, and remaining food in local markets might last only a short time if access restrictions continued. Ten of Taiz's 16 districts had previously been classified at Emergency, the second-worst level on the five-level scale used to classify acute hunger. ^[3]

Children were entering this crisis already weakened. UNICEF said it had screened more than 168,000 children in Taiz during 2026 and found more than 52,000 acutely malnourished, including more than 11,500 with severe acute malnutrition. ^[4]

UNICEF had positioned nearly 8,000 cartons of therapeutic food in the governorate. Access restrictions could still prevent those supplies from reaching treatment sites and families. ^[4]

The next weeks bring a second pressure alongside the blocked roads. WFP said it needed $268 million to sustain food assistance, nutrition programmes and logistics through 2027, and warned that without new funding it would have to reduce assistance from November. ^[3]