UN accuses Saudi-led coalition of killing Yemeni civilians in past week

The United Nations human rights office on Friday accused the Saudi-led coalition of killing 42 civilians in Yemen over the past week, with multiple children among the dead.

“In the week from August 17 to August 24, 58 civilians have been killed, including 42 by the Saudi-led coalition,” spokeswoman Liz Throssell told reporters in Geneva, AFP reported.

The UN toll counted a series of strikes on Wednesday, including an attack on a hotel in Sana’a Governorate that killed 33 people and a separate strike on a house, also in Sana’a, that left six people dead.

On Tuesday, “a woman and two children were killed and two women and two children were injured when an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a house in Talan village” in Sana’a Governorate, according to a rights office statement.

“In all these cases, in which civilians were killed and injured, witnesses said that there had been no warnings that an attack was imminent,” it added.

Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, and to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement. Riyadh has, however, failed to reach its goals despite suffering great expense.

 

Children dead in new airstrike

 

Children were among at least nine people killed in an airstrike on Friday in a residential neighborhood of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, witnesses and medics said.

The attack is the latest in a wave of deadly raids on residential areas of Yemen launched by a Saudi-led coalition, drawing strong international condemnation.

Friday’s air raid destroyed two buildings in the southern district of Faj Attan, leaving people buried under debris, said an AFP photographer on the scene.

The images he took showed severely damaged buildings, piles of smashed concrete blocks and splintered beams of wood.

The Al-Massira television channel run by the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement said the airstrike had killed 14 civilians including six children, blaming the Saudi-led coalition for the strike.

Medics at the site and a security source confirmed at least nine people had been killed.

Mohammed Ahmad, who lived in one of the buildings, said he was among those who had taken nine bodies to a hospital.

“We extracted them one by one from under the rubble,” he said. “Some of them were children from a single family.”

“When the rocket hit, one of the buildings was immediately destroyed which caused the building next door to collapse too. Some residents got out, but others were trapped.”

Some of them died and others were wounded, he told AFP.

The World Health Organization estimates nearly 8,400 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led alliance intervened.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized the coalition, which controls Yemen’s airspace, over the civilian death toll from the bombing campaign.

Northern and southern Yemen have both come under aerial attack in recent months, and the coalition has come under massive pressure from international organizations including the United Nations for its role in the raids.

The United Nations has said the Saudi coalition was likely responsible for a July attack on the southwestern Taez Province that killed 20 people, including children.

An air raid on a funeral reception in Arhab killed eight women and one child in February, prompting the Saudi-led coalition to announce it was “investigating the reports”.

The coalition has not however admitted responsibility for the attack.

The United States also regularly conducts drone strikes on Yemen which Washington says target Al-Qaeda.

Yemen also faces a deadly cholera outbreak that has claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected more than half a million people since late April.

The combination of war, disease and a coalition blockade have pushed the country, long the poorest in the Arab world, to the brink of famine.