The strike, in which a member of MSF staff was also killed, was the latest in an increasing number of attacks targeting places commonly used by civilians, including hospitals where MSF doctors and nurses work.
Advertisement
The airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition that hit a hospital in Yemen on Monday can be considered a war crime, Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa Program Deputy Director said in a statement.
MSF said it would withdraw staff from six hospitals in Yemen’s northern governorates of Saada and Hajjah.
Also on Monday, Tunisia said the release of Tunisian-French ICRC staffer Nourane Houas, who was kidnapped in Yemen in December past year, had become a priority for Tunisian diplomacy. The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out airstrikes since March, 2015.
The organisation’s desk manager for Emergency Unit in Yemen, Teresa Sancristóval, said, “This is the fourth attack against a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) facility in less than 12 months”.
Alessandra Vellucci from the United Nations said: “The Secretary General notes that the parties to the conflict in Yemen have damaged or destroyed over 70 health centres including three other MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres)-supported facilities”.
Yemen fell into a civil war in late 2014 when the Ansar Allah (Houthis) and allied forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh overran the capital of Sanaa and other provinces, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and his Saudi-backed government to temporarily flee to Riyadh.
Meanwhile, Saudi state television reported that seven civilians were killed Tuesday by projectiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi group on the southern Saudi city of Najaran, in one of the deadliest cross-border attacks on the kingdom. All were between the ages of 6 and 15, according to Doctors Without Borders, whose staff members treated the victims at its facility there.
The group said in May that at least 100 staff members, patients and caretakers were killed, and another 130 were wounded, in aerial bombing and shelling attacks on more than 80 MSF-supported and run health structures in 2015 and early 2016.
After Monday’s airstrike, several global humanitarian groups have condemned the Yemeni hospital bombing.
Coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Assiri has said the weekend strikes hit a Huthi training camp and killed rebel fighters.
In spite of a recent resolution by the United Nations condemning violence against medical facilities, Sancristóval said that nothing had been done by global leaders to protect medical facilities in Yemen.
Advertisement
Earlier this month, the coalition acknowledged “shortcomings” in two out of eight cases it has investigated of UN-condemned air strikes on civilian targets in Yemen.
