A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition accused the Houthis of escalating attacks along the border, where the alliance had scaled back its military operations to give the Yemeni peace talks a chance to succeed.
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The civilians, who were working overnight shifts at a potato chip factory in the Nahda district, were killed following the disintegration of peace talks, according to medics.
According to Reuters, Saudi Arab resumed the air strikes after a five month hiatus after United Nations -brokered peace talks broke down over the weekend.
The U.S. -backed Saudi coalition is seeking to restore the democratically-elected government of President, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who was forced to flee Sanaa in February by Houthi rebels, who are being supported by elite units from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They say the airstrikes were targeting Yemen’s Shiite rebels in Sanaa but instead one of them hit a food factory.
With U.S. backing, Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen for over a year, causing the majority of the conflict’s civilian casualties.
Residents said the factory was inside an army maintenance camp that had been hit by repeated air strikes since fighting began in March previous year.
While the secretive Saudi government has not formally disclosed its battles losses from its 16-month involvement with its neighbor’s civil war, videos posted on YouTube purport to show rebels blowing up Abrams tanks with Iranian-made rockets.
Nine of the victims were women and seven of the injured were left in critical condition, an official at the Sana’a factory said.
The airstrikes on the Yemeni capital, which targeted Houthi rebels, are the first since April, when the UN-sponsored negotiations between the Saudi-backed government and the Iran-allied Houthis began.
Numerous dead are said to be young women who were working in the factory at the time of the strike.
But on battlefronts in two areas northeast of the capital Sanaa and in southern Bayda province, local officials said about 40 fighters were killed from both sides in renewed clashes. Al Jazeera puts the death toll at 14.
“The stakes in Yemen’s almost two-year conflict could not be higher”, she said in a statement.
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Airports have been closed and flights suspended across Yemen amid intensified Saudi Arabian military strikes against the impoverished country.
