An airstrike has killed 25 people near Yemens capital, Houthi official says
CAIRO (AP) — Airstrikes hit homes in a village near Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 30 others, mostly women and children, a spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry said.Speaking to The Associated Press, Anees Alasbahi accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes on al-Shariya.The AP could not independently verify the claims, and Saudi Arabia’s Information Ministry did not immediately reply to an AP request for comment.The toll reflected the rapid worsening of Yemen’s civil war, where a yearslong truce fell apart over the summer.
Fighting has escalated between the Iranian-backed Houthis — who control Sanaa, the north and the west of the country — and their Saudi-backed opponents based in the south and east.On Friday, an airstrike in a market in southern Yemen killed at least 30 people, according to Houthi officials.The Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed military each blamed the other for that strike.Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV of the aftermath of Saturday’s strikes showed staff carrying limp bodies of multiple young children out of ambulances at a local hospital.
One little girl’s head had been cleaved open.Other children lay on stretchers, bloodied and bandaged as staff tended to them.Footage from the farming village — located in Houthi-ruled territory about 15 kilometers (10 miles) northeast of Sanaa — showed the rubble of destroyed houses and dust filling the air as people hid in nearby agricultural fields.Alasbahi told Al-Masirah at least 25 people were killed, up from a toll of 22 he gave earlier to the AP.
He told the channel that civilians were still buried under the rubble of houses hit in the strikes, and that subsequent strikes targeted emergency workers as they tried to pull survivors out of the wreckage.Footage showed one wounded man covered in dust and wearing a first responder’s orange vest being helped out of an ambulance.The renewal of fighting has raised f...