TAIZ, Yemen, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Ali Hassan and his family took shelter under a stairwell at a school in Taiz as Iran-allied Houthi forces closed in around them, tightening a siege of Yemen's third-largest city.
The 42-year-old said the latest fighting between the group and Saudi-backed government forces had forced him to flee several times. The wider conflict has also left its mark on his body: a shot from a Houthi sniper paralysed his hand in 2021, he said.
"I only have my left hand," he told Reuters. A month ago, he added, another sniper shot his sister in the spine while she was herding sheep, leaving her completely disabled. Reuters could not verify his accounts.
THEATRE IN WIDER REGIONAL WAR
The city is fast becoming the most important front in Yemen's reignited civil war — itself a new theatre in the wider regional conflict that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February.
Houthi forces have encircled the city by cutting the main road south to Aden, forcing people from their homes and deepening a humanitarian crisis.
A Houthi victory in Taiz would mark one of the biggest turning points in a war that resumed this summer after a four-year truce. The group denies being armed by Iran and says it is fighting a corrupt system in Yemen.
Hassan said residents were facing Houthi fire and shortages of food and water as the group pushed for more territory. Last month, the Houthis tightened their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb shipping lane in a lightning advance.
On Thursday, the groupfired missiles at the presidential palace complex in the southern city of Aden, killing five people, the government said.
The Saudi-led coalition has also listed dozens of Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure in recent weeks.
The Aden strike and the Houthis' determination to take Taiz suggest the conflict could drag on, prolonging suffering in a city of almost 600,000.
FOCAL POINT OF FIGHTING
Taiz has been on the frontline between the Houthis and the government since the war's first days.
It is now the last major urban stronghold of anti-Houthi forces in the southern highland area of Yemen.
Resident Wathiq Mahyoub said prices were rising, fuel was running short and garbage was piling up on the streets.
"The siege is suffocating. It's strangling the citizens," Mahyoub told Reuters. "The Houthis refused to open the crossing for us, even to dump the rubbish."
War broke out in Yemen in 2014 when the Houthis seized the capital Sanaa, driving the government south to Aden. A Saudi-led military intervention the following year led to a bloody stalemate before a 2022 truce that held until this year.
Last week, government forces launched a campaign to recapture areas controlled by the Houthis, recovering ground near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key shipping artery.
Aid agencies have warned of rapidly worsening conditions in Yemen.
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
"There are no camps equipped to receive these families. We find some of these families living in large unfinished buildings," said Ahmed al-Jalal, director of the Executive Unit for the Management of Displaced Persons' Camps, Al-Muzaffar district, inTaiz governorate.
"Some are in shops, some in buildings unfit for living, with no essentials for living," he added.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Zoe Brennan, spokesperson for the UN migration agency, said 233,077 people have been displaced so far in the latest conflict, 121,530 of them in Taiz.
World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said 12 hospitals had about four days of fuel while there was a shortage of oxygen and medicines.
"Taiz is being cut off, and its hospitals are running out of supplies as fighting has reached urban districts where the main referral hospitals stand," he said. "Unfortunately, the road closures are blocking the resupply."
(Reporting by Reuters in Taiz and Olivia Le Poidevin in Geneva; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Andrew Heavens)