Besieged Taiz is being shoved 'back to the stone age', its governor warns

The governor of Taiz has accused the Houthis of trying to drag Yemen's third city back to the stone age, using a rare briefing to push the international community into breaking a month-long siege. Nabil Shamsan described massacres, oxygen and water running dry, and rubbish rotting in streets because landfill sites are full or out of reach. His message was blunt: solidarity statements do nothing, aid agencies including the UN need access to deliver supplies.

The numbers are brutal. Taiz needs roughly 35,000 cubic metres of water a day, Shamsan said, but no more than 1,000 cubic metres is getting through, with shipments halted at Houthi roadblocks ringing the city. Food stocks are gone, wheat prices are climbing and restaurants have shut for lack of fuel. He said as many as 1,800 people need dialysis they cannot reach, 120 health centres have been suspended, and closed schools have cut off hundreds of thousands of children.

Between August and 20 October 2026, 64 people were killed, civilians among them, and 173 more were wounded, according to Shamsan. He also said more than 6,400 families newly displaced by fighting, averaging seven members each, have poured into the city. His verdict on daily life: 'We are not talking about living, just surviving.'

The Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, flatly denies any siege. He said food, medicine and humanitarian aid can enter, even for Saudi-backed groups, and invited anyone who doubts it to come see for themselves. Shamsan countered that Houthi forces hold a near-total grip on the roads in, and that the group has told the more than 800,000 people inside they can 'either leave or die'.

Shamsan framed the campaign as an assault on Yemen's identity rather than a military fight, saying captured villages are being handed to new religious leaders and school curricula rewritten. Residents in occupied areas are being pressed to show loyalty to the Zaydi religion and sign forms confirming they have joined the Houthis, he said, calling it 'a war of vengeance'. He added that children in scores of villages are being ordered onto frontlines in Saada and elsewhere without their parents' consent.

Shelling of the city is growing more frequent and contact with rural areas has collapsed, Shamsan said, speaking from just 2-5km from the frontlines. He said the Houthis now control mobile networks, which he described as completely disrupted, and are texting residents to abandon resistance while listening in on calls. Human Rights Watch researcher Niku Jafarnia said renewed Houthi efforts to cut off food, water and medicine show 'utter disregard for civilian lives', noting a 12-year siege in which the group has bombed, starved and denied aid to a million residents with scant regard for international law.