Smoke and debris rise from the site of a Saudi-led air strike in Sanaa, Yemen August 31, 2016.
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At least 16 people have been killed in an airstrike carried out in northern Yemen.
The missiles struck the house of a Yemeni mosque imam on Wednesday in the northern Saada province, the Reuters news agency said.
As the main stronghold of Houthis, Saada province is the starting point from where the Houthi militias advanced and seized control of the capital Sanaa in 2014, forcing the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.
The airstrikes brought the house down on top of the family within, and while locals scrambled to try to dig any survivors out of the rubble, they reported that Saudi warplanes continued to circle overhead throughout the rescue operation, raising fears of secondary strikes.
Pictures taken at the scene of the attack show men digging up the body of a child from under the rubble.
Since March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Persian Gulf countries has been carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis at the Yemeni president’s request.
On Wednesday, a Saudi border guard, Corporal Abdullah Madkhali, was killed after shelling from Yemen hit a frontier post in the Jazan region, the kingdom s interior ministry said.
Coalition air strikes are responsible for some 60 percent of the civilians killed since March 2015, a United Nations rights office said in a report last week.
At least 10,000 people have been killed overall in Yemen’s 18-month-old civil war, the United Nations said on Tuesday, approaching double the estimates of more than 6,000 cited by officials and aid workers for much of 2016.
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The attack comes as U.N. Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who has been trying to halt the fighting and negotiate a political solution, told the Security Council Wednesday that a new cessation of hostilities is key to restarting talks to end the civil war in Yemen.
