At the al-Thawra hospital in the besieged city of Taiz, doctors gather outside the operating room to discuss which of their patients will be left to die. Without enough medicine and oxygen to treat all those injured in Yemen's pitiless civil war, hard decisions have to be made.
On the day I arrived, in mid-December, the choice was between a tiny six-year-old girl, Asma, and an old man with a gangrenous wound to the abdomen.
Asma had been hit by shrapnel as she queued to collect drinking water from a lorry. Nineteen other children were injured in the attack, and five were killed. The impact had broken away a shard of Asma's skull as big as the palm of my hand. Despite the severity of her injuries, the trauma surgeon began a desperate effort to save her.
The smell in the operating room was nauseating - a stench of blood and disinfectant, and of the white surgical plaster that the surgeon was shaping in his hands to patch the hole in Asma's head. He worked fast, racing to complete the operation before the oxygen ran out and increased the damage to the child's brain.
he mortar that shattered Asma's skull was almost certainly fired by Houthi rebels as part of an eight-month campaign to wrest Taiz, Yemen's second-largest city, from the control of forces loyal to the country's internationally-recognised government. To that end the Houthis have mounted a siege on Taiz, cutting off nearly all routes into the city and preventing even basic supplies from getting in by road.
The only way around the road blocks are mule tracks and smugglers' trails through the Sabr mountains. Everything - flour, rice, cooking gas, diesel, medicine - has to come over these trails to reach the starving and embattled people of Taiz.
I reached the city on a narrow dirt path that wound high into the hills, taking us around the front lines but not beyond the range of the Houthi snipers. The trail carries a steady flow of pack animals laden with food, weapons, oxygen and gas canisters, and we often had to make way for camels and donkeys that were herded along the path by children. Among them was a boy no older than four carrying a single piece of firewood, struggling beneath the weight but determined to keep pace with a group of older boys.
There were other women on the trail, most wearing the traditional clothing of the mountains - flowing dresses of yellow, orange, or pink worn over loose trousers - and many carrying bundles of firewood on their heads. I was the only one wearing the black abaya, a garment not designed for scrambling across rocks.
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