Sanaa, Yemen – Rajaa Ghirsan, a 50-year-old seamstress from Sanaa, Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital, can barely speak or breathe due to obstructions in her airway. Her vocal cord paralysis and severe complications in her larynx have left her dependent on a device fitted around her neck to keep air flowing and stave off suffocation. The device has to be replaced every two months and costs $100 each time.
She has undergone six operations in Egypt and India since 2006 in an attempt to try to help her breathe normally, but she now needs another complex operation abroad to open her airway. As Yemen’s conflict-weakened health system lacks the infrastructure and specialist care required, she will need to head overseas for treatment. After registering with the Higher Medical Committee in Sanaa, the body responsible for arranging medical treatment abroad, she spent seven years trying to secure a seat on a once-weekly flight to Amman, where Yemeni patients have been treated.
But repeated closures and air attacks have kept that flight out of reach, and she cannot afford the long overland journey to Aden airport, which is her only alternative out of the country. The airport is the main air link for millions living under Houthi control in the north, but it has been repeatedly shut since the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis closed it to commercial traffic in August 2016. A United Nations-brokered truce allowed a limited number of flights to resume in May 2022, but Israeli air attacks in 2025 damaged the airport and destroyed aircraft.
In July, Yemeni government forces backed by Saudi Arabia struck its only working runway to prevent an Iranian plane with a Houthi delegation from landing. As of today, no regular flights leave the capital, while Aden, the seat of the internationally recognised government and the main alternative for patients in the north, has also come under attack. Anis al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Houthi-run Ministry of Health in Sanaa, told Al Jazeera that repeated closures of Sanaa airport over the past decade have affected about 400,000 patients, including 250,000 who need treatment abroad.
The flight disruptions have also affected more than 125,000 people with cancer who face shortages of medicine. This month, UN envoy Hans Grundberg told the Security Council that the country had slid back into full-scale war. Aden’s airport has been hit twice this month, most recently on October 16, when two missiles landed about 500 metres (550 yards) from a Yemenia plane preparing to take off for Cairo.
With Sanaa airport out of operation, Aden’s under attack, and unrest this year in Seiyun, a city in the eastern province of Hadramout that hosts another airport, patients in northern Yemen have limited options. Mohammed Shajara, 30, tried to reach Tehran for treatment for his paraplegic five-year-old daughter in June. But he was left stranded in Tehran when the government blocked Iranian flights to and from Sanaa in July, so they returned without treatment.
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