Fighting has intensified since United Nations -sponsored peace talks between the Houthis, backed by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the internationally recognised government ended on Saturday without an agreement.
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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) – Saudi Arabia says its air force has intercepted two ballistic missiles fired from Yemen into the kingdom.
Coalition air raids on the capital – the first for three months – on Tuesday hit a factory, killing 14 people, according to medics.
Social media users affiliated with the Houthi rebels uploaded horrific images allegedly showing corpses of civilians killed in Sanaa, with the caption “The Saudi aggression is targeting today a food factory in Sanaa”.
Residents said the factory was inside an army maintenance camp that had been hit by repeated air strikes since fighting began in March a year ago. The nearest rebel post is almost a mile away.
Numerous dead are said to be young women who were working in the factory at the time of the strike.
Yemen’s SABA news agency, which is now under Houthi control, said dozens of airstrikes pounded Sanaa, the Houthis’ northern stronghold of Saada, the western cities of Taiz and Jouf, and the Red Sea ports of Makha and Houdeida over the past 24 hours. More than 6,000 people have died, including thousands of civilians and children, according to the UN.
A report released this week by the Saudi-led coalition largely cleared itself of wrongdoing during eight high-profile bombings and concluded that all “safety procedures implemented by coalition forces adhered to worldwide humanitarian law”.
The approval for land force equipment comes at a time when Saudi Arabia is leading a military coalition in support of Yemeni forces loyal to the exiled government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi who are trying to oust Iran-allied Houthi forces from the capital, Sanaa. The UN child protection agency Unicef has said more than 1,100 children were confirmed to have died since the conflict began past year.
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Rasha Mohamed, from Amnesty International told The Independent: “While there’s been a lull in hostilities over recent months, there was never a genuine let-up in the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s bombing campaign”. The announcement does not even mention the conflict in Yemen, yet it gives a glimpse into this wildly underreported war between Arab states, the US, and the Houthis.
