The Saudi-led coalition denied Tuesday its warplanes were behind the bombing of a wedding in southwestern Yemen in which 131 people were killed.
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Missiles reportedly hit two tents in a village near the Red Sea port of Mocha, where a man linked to the Houthi rebel movement was celebrating his marriage.
A medical source at a local hospital in Maqbana said Tuesday that the death toll from the attack had risen to 131, from 27 reported on Monday.
It says more than 21 million people in Yemen need help, or about 80 percent of the population.
“Any intentional attack against civilians is considered a serious violation of worldwide humanitarian law”, Ban said in a statement.
A spokesman said: “There have been no air operations by the coalition in that area for three days”.
He added that the coalition would concede a mistake if it made one, but Yemen’s conflict was chaotic with a grab bag of armed groups active, and that civilians sometimes could not differentiate between cannon, mortar and rocket fire.
The attack on the wedding party in Al-Wahijah came on the same day that US President Barack Obama addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and hypocritically presented his administration as a staunch defender of human rights and proponent of peace and stability around the world.
The coalition said its intervention aims to restore Hadi’s authority in the country. The U.S., which provides logistical and targeting support to the coalition – in addition to selling billions of dollars in armaments to Gulf States – wavered for more than a week after the Netherlands introduced a resolution authorizing such a mission at the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
In April, the Shia militia also managed to capture Yemen’s southern Aden province, from which President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi – along with most of his government – was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.
In July, coalition-backed loyalist forces evicted the rebels from the southern city of Aden and four other provinces in the south. They have since set their sights on advancing on rebel-held Sanaa.
In the past months, Yemeni army and pro-government forces backed by the coalition have succeeded in wresting control of a number of areas in Yemen from the Houthi rebels.
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A district commander and a sergeant in Saudi Arabia’s border guard have been killed in an attack launched from across the frontier with Yemen, the Saudi interior ministry said on Saturday. “King Salman, I am asking you why this air strike?”
