GENEVA — Civilians struggling to survive street battles and Saudi-led air strikes in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden are also facing shrinking supplies of food and fuel, a senior official from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

Hunger and disease are threatening the 1 million residents of Aden, now a war zone caught between local militiamen and Houthi fighters, Bertrand Lamon told Reuters in Geneva.

“The general level of food stocks in Aden has been dramatically reduced because of the lesser volume of imports by sea and difficulty to transport items by road from Sanaa,” the outgoing head of the ICRC’s delegation in Aden said.   

Lamon worked in Aden from January 2014 and stayed months into the Houthi military push on the city that prompted an Arab military intervention on March 26.

A Saudi-led coalition of Gulf Arab countries has been bombing the Iran-allied Houthis for three months to try to restore Yemen’s exiled government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Nationwide fuel shortages have spread disease and suffering in arid Yemen, where access to water usually depends on fuel -powered pumps and over 20 million people – 80 percent of the population – needs some form of aid, according to the United Nations.

The United Nations has quoted Aden health officials as saying that 8,000 people had contracted dengue fever in the city since the crisis began in March, including 590 who died from the disease.