A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.
A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.
Shire has seen a huge influx of people over the past four months, and it was ill prepared.
Its schools and a university campus have become theatres of suffering.
Aid agencies estimate some 200,000 people are currently living in the city’s makeshift camps. Many of them are women and children.
The first arrivals came back in November when fighting broke out. They mostly came from the southern and south-western lowlands of Tigray that were hotbeds of the fighting in the early days.
Inside Tigray, Ethiopia, most of the displaced people stay with the host community, while tens of thousands live in informal sites or are still hiding in the bush or the mountains. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation of hundreds of thousands of people who have been deprived of medical care for months and have received little humanitarian assistance.
