GENEVA: The UN said on Tuesday it had delivered medical supplies to the southern Yemeni city of Aden, where fighting has badly disrupted health provision, but that food rations had been delayed.

The World Health Organization brought 46.4 tons of assistance including trauma kits, medicines to treat malaria and diarrheal diseases, and water and sanitation supplies for more than 84,000 people.

“It took us days and days and days to organize the safe passage ... But it did arrive in Aden last Saturday. It was the first time that we got a convoy into Aden for weeks,” Johannes Van Der Klaauw, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, told a news briefing.

The UN convoy was to have included rations from the World Food Program “but the WFP trucks in the end were disconnected from that convoy” he said without elaborating.

Hunger and disease are threatening the 1 million residents of Aden, now a war zone caught between local militiamen and Houthi fighters, aid agencies say.

The United Nations says 21 million people need help, about 80 percent of the population of the country.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is “very much disappointed” that a UN-brokered humanitarian pause in fighting did not take hold over the weekend, his spokesman said on Monday.

Van Der Klaauw said that the UN wanted to have aid ships dock in Aden. “But since the pause didn’t take place, we still have a big problem that Aden is not reachable by sea. And it should be.”

As vessels are diverted to the northern port of Hodeida, goods have to be taken by land to Aden and there is a perception “that vessels have only gone into that part of Yemen which is in the hands of the de facto Houthi authorities.”

Meanwhile, Yemeni forces battling the Shiite rebels in the country’s south say they have taken control of the airport in Aden and that they have driven the rebels into a part of the city jutting out into the sea.

The advance is a major blow for the Houthis, basically trapping them on the small peninsula.

Ali Al-Ahmadi, the spokesman for the city’s anti-rebel forces known as Aden Resistance Leadership Council, says the operation was coordinated with the Saudi-led coalition.

Also on Tuesday, the Saudi-led coalition carried out airstrikes in Sanaa.