Fighting in the Libyan city of Derna has reached unprecedented levels, with air raids, shelling of residential areas and heavy ground clashes, the UN humanitarian office said in a report on Thursday.
The UN said there were severe water, food and medicine shortages, and electricity and water were completely cut off for the approximately 125,000 residents of Derna, which has been encircled since July 2017 by the Libyan National Army (LNA).
NAN reports that on May 8, the LNA captured high ground outside Derna in fierce fighting, the second day of its offensive against militias holding the eastern Libyan town.
LNA units backed by air strikes and artillery captured hills around Fattaih, 15 km east of the town, as mobile forces pressed against the coastal settlement from five points.
The town, on the coastal highway between Benghazi and Egypt, is the last opposition bastion to the LNA in eastern Libya, and LNA commander Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar vowed that it would be captured.
Derna is controlled by a militia coalition, the Derna Mujahaddin Shura Council (DMSC), and the LNA has been encircling the town for the past three years.
Field Marshall Haftar declared on Monday that attempts to negotiate a peaceful end to the militia occupation of Derna had broken down.
Derna has had a chequered history.
In November 2014 it was captured by ISIS.
The DMSC, composed of locally-raised militias, pushed ISIS out of town the next June.
Egypt has in the past launched air strikes at what it said were terrorist training camps operating in the town.
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