SANA, Yemen — Hundreds of families are trapped in their homes by weeks of fighting in the center of the southern city of Aden — their only lifeline coming from volunteers making dangerous runs across the city’s harbor in rickety boats with food and medicine.
Their plight is just one level of the misery in Aden, once Yemen’s commercial hub. In a month of unrelenting urban warfare, Shiite rebels and their allies in the military have tried to capture the city, battling with militiamen as warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition pound the rebels with airstrikes.
The city, once home to a million people, has been systematically destroyed.
Wheat is scarce after grain silos at the port were destroyed by airstrikes after the rebels, known as Houthis, took refuge in them. Other strikes have hit hotels and schools and even the city’s main shopping mall. Aden’s main hospital was stormed by militias, snatching some people receiving treatment as doctors and patients fled, according to the U.N.
“They are starving us,” said Mohammed Mater, a resident who has been trapped in his home for weeks with his wife and seven children, with no electricity or running water.
One of the few sources of supplies are the boat runs organized by volunteers. Several times over the past week, the group has gathered food and medicine and delivered it by boat from mainland neighborhoods of Aden, crossing some 3 miles across the harbor to the peninsula.
