US military officials have advised the Saudi-led coalition on measures to prevent civilian casualties, Stump said. The attack on Abs hospital is the fourth and deadliest on any MSF-supported facility during this war and there have been countless attacks on other health facilities and services all over Yemen.
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McConnaughey said that “if the need arises” the team directly assigned to coalition cooperation could be augmented.
Medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) – also known as Doctors Without Borders – has announced it will withdraw from northern Yemen, in the wake of an airstrike by the Saudi coalition that struck one of its hospitals on Monday, killing 19 and wounding 24.
Not long ago, the United States announced $1.5 billion in new arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
“We very much regret MSF’s decision to evacuate staff from six hospitals in northern Yemen”, the coalition said in a statement, seeking to shift responsibility onto the charity.
The Saudi-led coalition began its bombing campaign in March past year after Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels seized large parts of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa.
The coalition has told AFP it uses highly accurate laser- and GPS-guided weapons – many supplied by the U.S. – and verifies targets many times to avoid civilian casualties. The spokesman said that the U.S. support to Saudi Arabia was not a blank cheque.
More than 6,500 people have been killed, over half of them civilians, since the Saudi-led coalition began its assault on Yemen in March 2015.
Ban expressed alarm at “the escalation of airstrikes and ground fighting in Yemen and along the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border” since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks in Kuwait.
“If you talk to Yemeni Americans, they will tell you in Yemen this isn’t a Saudi bombing campaign, it’s a USA bombing campaign”, Murphy said in June.
Meanwhile, the rebel-controlled Saba news agency reported three civilians killed in a coalition raid yesterday near the Huthi-held capital Sanaa.
In exclusive remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper on Wednesday, the Yemeni premier said that the majority of members in the General People’s Congress (GPC) were supporting the legitimate government, contrary to recent claims by former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had stated that the GPC was still backing the rebellion. “It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis to mollify them after the nuclear deal with Iran”, editors wrote.
Intelligence is still being provided to the Saudis, the Fifth Fleet spokesman said. “The final decision on targets is up to them”.
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The coalition, which has repeatedly said that it is upholding worldwide humanitarian law and not deliberately targeting civilians, has also set up an independent team to investigate the incidents with civilian casualties.
