---
title: "Getting a Yemeni patient out of the country now costs $2,300 and a 14-hour road"
description: "Sanaa’s airport is shut, Aden’s is under fire, and patients who need surgery abroad wait for years or die on the way out"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-20T11:52:11Z
modified: 2026-10-21T01:23:58Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/getting-a-yemeni-patient-out-of-the-country-now-costs-2-300--99103c
language: en
tags: ["yemen", "health", "war", "houthi", "airport", "mideast"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Getting a Yemeni patient out of the country now costs $2,300 and a 14-hour road

*Sanaa’s airport is shut, Aden’s is under fire, and patients who need surgery abroad wait for years or die on the way out*

By Nate Ledger · October 20, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/getting-a-yemeni-patient-out-of-the-country-now-costs-2-300--99103c

## In brief

- Yemeni patients who need surgery abroad are stuck as fighting shuts or threatens the country’s airports
- Sanaa airport has no regular flights after years of closures, Israeli strikes in 2025 and a government strike on its runway in July
- Aden airport was hit twice in October; the UN envoy told the Security Council Yemen had slid back into full-scale war
- One family spent about $2,300 on the road route to Aden; the patient, who had kidney failure, died on the way in January
- Health officials say 19.3 million people need health aid, the response is 17% funded and neither side has a medevac programme

Rajaa Ghirsan is a 50-year-old seamstress in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital held by the Houthis. Vocal cord paralysis and complications in her larynx have made it hard for her to speak or breathe. A device fitted around her neck keeps air moving. It has to be replaced every two months at $100 a time, which comes to $600 a year just to keep breathing. Since 2006 she has had six operations in Egypt and India, and she needs one more complex surgery abroad. Her daughter, Nouran al-Salawi, 28, has looked after her for a decade. As she told [Rachid Mohsen, reporting for Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/features/2026/10/20/yemens-critically-ill-are-trapped-as-war-closes-the-countrys-airports), her mother is waiting for a final operation “or she is waiting for death instead.”

The surgery exists, and in principle so does a way to reach it. Ghirsan registered with Sanaa’s Higher Medical Committee and then spent seven years trying to get a seat on the weekly flight to Amman. A weekly flight over seven years is something like 360 departures, and she was never on one. The other way out is overland to Aden, which she can’t afford. So what she’s short of is a seat on a plane, and in Yemen that is a hard thing to get.

Here is how that came about. The Saudi-led coalition closed Sanaa airport to commercial traffic in August 2016. A UN-brokered truce allowed limited flights again from May 2022. In 2025, Israeli strikes damaged the airport and destroyed aircraft. In July this year, Saudi-backed government forces hit its only working runway to stop an Iranian plane carrying a Houthi delegation. No regular flights now leave Sanaa.

![An empty wheelchair faces a deep break across a desert runway, with a passenger airplane on the far side and mountains in the distance.](https://rews.cc/img/2e39e776be6a05ec0c8db80d8ee155c4c2b1c3c1.webp)

Aden, the government’s seat, was the fallback, and now it is a target too. Its airport was hit twice this month. On October 16, [two missiles landed about 500 metres](https://rews.cc/a/two-houthi-missiles-land-500-metres-from-a-cairo-bound-plane-f856f0) from a Yemenia plane that was about to leave for Cairo. On October 9 the UN envoy Hans Grundberg [told the Security Council](https://dppa.un.org/en/news/this-week-in-dppa-3-9-october-2026) that fighting was escalating on several fronts and that the humanitarian situation was getting worse, especially in Taiz. In his own words, Yemen had “slid back into full-scale war.” At the same briefing he condemned Houthi attacks on Saudi airports, including [King Khalid International in Riyadh](https://rews.cc/a/the-prince-who-wanted-airports-full-of-tourists-gets-them-fu-3a9994). The airports themselves are now part of the war.

## The road, itemised

If you can’t fly out of Sanaa you drive to Aden: about 14 hours, through dozens of checkpoints. Abdulkarim Abdullah, 60, had kidney failure and needed dialysis every week. The Amman flights had been suspended and Seiyun airport, in Hadramout, was out of service. His brother Mohammed paid for the Aden route, and the costs he gave were $200 for a car, $500 for a hotel, $400 for security clearances and $1,200 for tickets. That adds up to $2,300. He raised it by selling his sister-in-law’s gold and his own car. In a country where [a public salary is gone within the first ten days of the month](https://rews.cc/a/from-aden-to-sanaa-a-yemeni-salary-is-gone-before-the-month--dadce6), that is an enormous sum. Abdulkarim died on the road to Aden in January.

![A winding mountain road transforms into a large ornate gold bracelet in a rocky desert landscape, with a car, distant villages, and layered mountains.](https://rews.cc/img/9d7292404d88bdeb73c0e4be9cb1fbea92f64a44.webp)

Mohammed Shajara, 30, did get his paraplegic five-year-old daughter on a flight, to Tehran in June. Then in July the government blocked Iranian flights to and from Sanaa. They were stranded and came home with no treatment. He hasn’t tried the Aden road. He is waiting.

The two halves of the country count the problem differently, and both counts are bad. Anis al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Houthi health ministry, says the closures over the past decade have affected about 400,000 patients, 250,000 of whom need treatment abroad. He says more than 125,000 cancer patients face shortages of medicine. By his count more than 1,600 types of medicine are in short supply, including “12 cancer drugs that are barred from entering the country”, and more than 40,000 people with thalassemia and haemolytic anaemia lack iron chelation drugs and IV solutions. These are the ministry’s figures and haven’t been independently checked, but nothing on the government side suggests they are much too high.

On that side, Aref al-Hawshabi of the Aden health ministry’s National Centre for Health Education and Media says 1,170 patients from government-held areas have applied for free treatment abroad, and that “the real need is far higher.” The common reasons are cancers and blood diseases; bone marrow, liver and kidney transplants; cochlear implants and corneal transplants; heart disease and scoliosis; and congenital reproductive malformations. Getting out is only half of it. Some patients end up stuck abroad, and others have trouble getting into India and Jordan.

![Four people sit on a wooden bench with luggage, facing enormous weathered red doors marked with a small illuminated bed symbol.](https://rews.cc/img/ae4acb3073172cce712b8bf6ecb6bb3248873c87.webp)

Hadramout, in the east, shows what the rest of the system looks like. Nadia al-Rashidi, who heads the Hayat Jadida NGO there, says flights from al-Rayyan airport in Mukalla to Aden and on to Cairo run only once a week. Al-Ghaydah airport in al-Mahra is closed. Al-Rayyan and Seiyun have only partly reopened since forces linked to the Southern Transitional Council were pushed out of the south in January. Security clearances for Egypt and Jordan take about half a month, she says, or you can pay $200 to fast-track them. For a dialysis patient, half a month is a long time to wait, and $200 is what it costs not to.

In Taiz, which [the Houthis are closing in on](https://rews.cc/a/yemen-s-government-declares-it-will-retake-everything-starti-86d1ab), Fouad al-Haddad, director of al-Jumhuri Hospital, says patients have died waiting. Closed roads mean long detours through the mountains that many patients are too sick to survive. Government figures say nearly 147,000 people were displaced in September, more than 80,000 of them to Taiz.

In September the government’s health minister, Qasim Buhaibeh, warned that some areas could lose health services altogether. He said 19.3 million people need health assistance and the response is only 17 percent funded, with dialysis and cancer care the most at risk. Seventeen percent works out to roughly one person in six. “I see the price that Yemenis pay every day in the wards,” al-Haddad said.

Neither half of Yemen has a medical evacuation programme. What exists instead is a list of prices: $200 for a car, $400 for clearances, and $200 if you want the clearances faster.