Houthi Forces Cut the Supply Roads to Yemen Hospitals

Yemen’s hospitals are turning away pregnant women and hungry children after Houthi forces seized the Red Sea coast and cut the roads that still carried medicine and fuel. Tarek al-Salami, 7, reached Aden two days after his father walked him 270 kilometers (170 miles) from Mokha, and the first hospital had no bed.

Foreign Minister Afrah al-Zouba told a United Nations meeting that Yemen’s Executive Unit for displaced persons recorded 131,781 people in 19,417 families fleeing between 1 and 16 September. The wounded fill the visible wards. Mokha’s port and the Taiz road no longer move the medicine those wards need.

Houthi Fighters Cut the Coast That Fed the Hospitals

Houthi forces took the port city of Mokha on 10 September after a short ground push down the western coast, then moved onto nearby islands including Perim in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Government-aligned National Resistance units pulled back. Families left overnight. The group now holds the shoreline that aid ships used and the road that tied Mokha to Taiz.

Partner access from Aden to the West Coast has stopped, the World Health Organization said on 23 September from Aden, and the paved Taiz-Aden route has been hit again and again. Casualties from the Lahj front are being sent down the Lahj-Aden axis into Aden’s receiving hospitals. On 18 September, ambulances were fired on at the Kahbub front in Lahj, killing a driver and an emergency responder.

THE COASTAL GRAB

1. August 6, 2026: WHO begins the casualty count that later reaches 3,672 people across the new fighting.
2. August 23, 2026: An ICRC mobile surgical team starts work at Marib General Hospital.
3. September 10, 2026: Houthi fighters capture Mokha and its port after government-aligned forces withdraw.
4. September 11, 2026: The group pushes south to Dhubab and onto Perim and the Hanish islands.
5. September 18, 2026: ICRC lands 22 tonnes of supplies in Sanaa; an ambulance crew is killed in Lahj.

Nine health facilities or health assets in Taiz, Lahj and Al-Hodeidah have been damaged, closed, put out of service or directly attacked, WHO said. That is the map change. The medical change is that trucks cannot use the old coastal road, so fuel, blood bags and gloves now ride mountain tracks that large convoys cannot take.

Only 6% of Assessed Facilities Can Treat Trauma

Of 5,415 health service units WHO has assessed, around 60% are fully functioning, 35% are partly functioning and 4% are not functioning. The agency found full trauma care in only 6% of those units. Between 6 August and 18 September it recorded 3,672 casualties, including 674 deaths and 2,998 injuries, with 680 of them in the six days to 18 September.

Marib still carries the largest load, 1,690 casualties. Taiz and the West Coast follow with 1,349. Lahj became the busiest front in that mid-September window, with 284 casualties, and more than 3,000 displaced families are camped in Al-Madharibah and Ras Al-Arah, the same Lahj district logging those cases.

THE LOAD ON YEMEN’S HOSPITALS

Dr Syed Jaffar Hussain, WHO’s representative in Yemen, said the health system was already carrying a heavy burden and that the new fighting is putting still more pressure on hospitals, staff and emergency care. WHO has shifted to its Scenario 2 plan across 11 governorates and is trying to keep a 60-day buffer of critical stocks while it opens other supply lines through Hadramout and Oman.

في ظل تزايد الاحتياجات في #اليمن، توسّع منظمة الصحة العالمية نطاق استجابتها، بالتنسيق مع وزارة الصحة العامة والسكان.

وقد سلّمت المنظمة أكثر من 2270 طنًا من الإمدادات الطبية، ودعمت أكثر من 5185 عملية جراحية، وقدّمت الرعاية إلى أكثر من 33 ألف مريض.

🔗 https://t.co/2hWAthyBuw pic.twitter.com/7vhxpCLYUu

— WHO Yemen (@WHOYemen) September 23, 2026

Pregnant Women Are Being Pushed Off the Wards

Before this offensive, preventable pregnancy complications were already killing three Yemeni women every day, among the worst rates in the Arab region. UNFPA said on 21 September that the displaced include about 30,000 women of childbearing age and more than 2,700 displaced pregnant women. At least 500 of them need comprehensive emergency obstetric and newborn care. About 300 were expected to give birth within two weeks of that warning.

For women and girls in Yemen, this is a race against time. When violence closes a health facility or an impassable road prevents a woman from reaching skilled care, a preventable complication can become a death sentence.

Francesco Galtieri, UNFPA Representative in Yemen, 21 September 2026 statement

Emergency obstetric wards in Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi in Taiz have closed. Displaced women have given birth in the open. Hashem Osseiran, an ICRC spokesman, said some hospitals near the fighting converted maternity wards into emergency rooms and then ran short of anesthesia, oxygen and sterile surgical gloves.

At Martyr Mohamed Hayel hospital in government-held Marib, which treats mothers and children, Dr Ahmed Modhesh said more emergency maternity cases are arriving because other city hospitals have switched to the wounded. A midwife there, speaking without name because she was not cleared to talk, said births had roughly doubled to about 80. The staff still saved a woman who arrived bleeding from an ectopic pregnancy. Marib General, a different hospital, had already paused maternity and obstetric work in August so it could handle trauma and a mortuary that had run out of space, WHO said on 10 September.

UNFPA’s 2026 Yemen appeal of $71 million is 20% funded. The agency says it needs $22.7 million now to reach 80,000 households with relief kits and 140,000 recently displaced women and girls with reproductive health and protection care. Its Rapid Response Mechanism, run with UNICEF, WFP and IOM, had reached more than 60,000 displaced people within 72 hours of the fighting. Galtieri said the need is growing faster than the money.

Taiz Hospitals Warn They May Have to Close

Tarek sat in a diaper in Aden looking almost too weak to hold his head. The malnutrition and diarrhea that put him there would, in a normal week, have been treated in a few days. His father, Mohammed al-Salami, carried him on foot after the rebels swept through Mokha. Aden’s first hospital, packed with wounded, turned them away. They found a therapeutic feeding center, where director Dr Arwa Atef said the boy arrived in acute crisis after the delay. He only began walking again on 23 September, more than a week later.

“I swear to God, when I look at him, my heart breaks,” Mohammed al-Salami said. “He looks almost lifeless.” Atef said the center cannot keep up. Yemen already had widespread hunger. Children with severe acute malnutrition plus medical complications are 12 times more likely to die than better-fed peers, WHO has said, and more than 18 million people are acutely short of food.

WHAT TAIZ AND ADEN WARDS ARE ABSORBING

• Lost hospitals: Three of Taiz province’s 17 hospitals are no longer under government control, said Fahd al-Nazari, manager of the provincial health office, which has taken in most of the newly displaced.
• The casualty count: Taiz hospitals had received about 635 casualties, including 112 dead, as of 24 September after Mokha fell, among them civilians and fighters.
• Shared beds: At the Yemeni-Swedish Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Taiz, incubators were full and two or three children were sharing emergency-room beds, general manager Sami al-Sharabi said.
• Aden surgery: Doctors Without Borders said more than 60 wounded people were admitted to Al-Gamhouria hospital in Aden in a week, many of them needing urgent surgery or blood.

Al-Nazari said the province is in a very dangerous situation and that some facilities might have to close within a day or two, or a week at most, with some hospitals already shut. “We’re exhausted receiving wounded people under these circumstances,” he said. Medical supplies and fuel are short because the Mokha-Taiz routes were largely cut, forcing convoys onto mountain roads that cannot take large trucks. Even before this fighting, public hospitals in the province had one MRI machine.

Al-Sharabi said he is scared the fighting would reach his hospital, and that any explosive that hit the building could destroy it because some parts are already weak. In Mokha itself, Doctors Without Borders said its small team was still working despite a severe shortage of health professionals, while three other hospitals closed for days and then reopened. Emmanuel Massart, the charity’s deputy coordinator of operations in Yemen, said resupply is the hard part because of closed roads, and that Yemen remains one of the worst aid crises in the world.

Sarah Ahmed, a health promotion supervisor with Doctors Without Borders at Mokha General Hospital, said staff there are keeping only the most essential services, including the neonatal unit. Pregnant women still need cesareans, she said, and children and other patients cannot wait. A private hospital treating rebels in Sanaa was described by two medical officials, speaking without names because of security fears, as overwhelmed with hundreds of wounded. Few aid agencies still work in Houthi-held areas after the group detained and harassed humanitarian workers.

The North Was Already Running Without the UN

The new fighting hit a system that was already thin. WHO estimated that 19.3 million people would need health aid in 2026, but money limits mean only 7.3 million, 38%, were prioritized. As of 10 September, partners had covered only 18% of the 2026 health appeal. Needs are worst in the north, under Houthi de facto authorities, where 90 of the Health Cluster’s 105 priority districts sit.

UN operations in the north have been suspended since October 2025 after staff detentions, office raids and asset seizures. Since last year the number of partner-supported health facilities there has fallen by 63%, and the number of people reached has fallen by 87%, WHO said. Public doctors in those areas have gone unpaid, and Houthi authorities have diverted tax revenue toward their military wing. Yemen’s Human Rights Ministry, in an 18 September statement from Aden, said Houthi units in Khokha and on the western coast looted medical clinics, food and medicine stores, and water and shelter projects funded by the King Salman aid centre, putting those services at risk of stopping altogether.

The ICRC is one of the few international agencies still able to work in Sanaa. On 18 September it delivered 22 tonnes of medical supplies to Sanaa to restock hospitals taking in war wounded. Christine Cipolla, the ICRC head of delegation in Yemen, said the fighting had overwhelmed hospitals short on supplies. A mobile surgical team has been at Marib General since 23 August. More than 50 Yemeni Red Crescent ambulances are running on both sides of the front. Cipolla said that in some parts of the country the ICRC is the only international aid group still on the ground.

اليوم، قمنا بتسليم 22 طنًا من الإمدادات الطبية المنقذة للحياة إلى صنعاء، وذلك في إطار استجابة طارئة أوسع نطاقًا للمرافق الصحية في جميع أنحاء اليمن
تعمل فرقنا على جميع جوانب خطوط المواجهة لتخفيف المعاناة الإنسانية ودعم خدمات الرعاية الصحية
اقرأ البيان هنا👈https://t.co/FSgUXPgQ73 pic.twitter.com/CiHUrJCQUq

— ICRC Yemen (@ICRC_ye) September 18, 2026

Aden’s Warehouse Is Out of Saline and Gloves

WHO has sent more than 2,270 metric tonnes of medical supplies to major hospitals, including fluids, trauma and surgical kits, blood bags and lab stocks, and it has given fuel to 32 facilities. Those operations, WHO said, enabled about 5,185 life-saving surgeries and care for more than 33,000 patients, with 12 surgical teams across nine governorates and 27 diarrhoea treatment centres. Seven ambulances supported 804 critical referrals, and more than 1,200 health workers were trained.

Then the new wave emptied the shelves. After three emergency dispatches, surgical supplies and antibiotics went to Al-Gamhoriah Teaching Hospital and 22 May Hospital in Aden on 13 September, Kara Hospital in Marib on 16 September, and Marib General on 17 September. WHO is also buying 17,000 adult and 3,000 paediatric blood bags for the National Blood Transfusion Centre and referral hospitals.

WHAT THE ADEN WAREHOUSE NO LONGER HOLDS

• Normal saline: Stocked out after the three emergency dispatches.
• Sterile surgical gloves: Stocked out on the same warehouse list.
• Atropine and potassium chloride: Both listed as stocked out; trauma kits and anaesthetic drugs remain unavailable.
• Disease load still in the wards: More than 18,000 suspected measles cases and 106 measles deaths have been reported in 2026, plus 390 diphtheria cases and 13 deaths, alongside cholera, dengue and malnutrition.

WHO is trying local buying and a fast shipment from its Dubai logistics hub. Hussain said the work now is to protect access, keep critical supplies moving, and strengthen hospitals and referral systems before the caseload grows again. Marib’s own population had already swollen from about 500,000 to more than 2 million after years of displacement, so every diverted bed there is a bed taken from a city that was already hosting other people’s wars.

The Last Road Into Taiz Is Under Fire

Government sources said overnight attacks before 25 September hit Hejat al-Abd, the steep mountain pass that is the remaining land route from Aden into Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city. If that road is cut, Taiz loses the last workable path for goods, patients and fuel. The Saudi-led coalition said the same day it had intercepted six ballistic missiles aimed at Taif and the Yanbu area on the Red Sea, the export shore Saudi Arabia has used while the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted in the wider Iran war.

That wider war is why Mokha mattered to navies and oil desks. For the feeding center in Aden, it mattered because a father had to walk a child 270 kilometers around a closed coast. About 4.5 million Yemenis were already displaced before this wave. WHO is preparing Mukalla as a backup logistics hub and planning for more people on the move. Al-Nazari said some Taiz hospitals were already closed. If the mountain road goes, the ones still open lose the last way to restock.