Saudi-led air strikes on a school in a rebel-held province of Yemen have killed 10 children, aid agencies said on Sunday, prompting fresh concerns over civilian casualties in the 17-month war.
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Some 300 Saudi air strikes killed at least 52 people and injured another 105 in just 48 hours, according to reports in the country.
A spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition did not respond to requests by Reuters for a comment on the reports.
The conflict has claimed more than 6,500 lives, about half of them civilians, and has plunged Yemen, already the Middle East’s poorest nation, into a humanitarian crisis and on the brink of starvation.
The country’s dominant Houthi group claimed it was a Saudi-led air strike on a school.
“Medical teams are assisting the wounded & toll is still unknown”, MSF’s Yemeni branch wrote on Twitter.
It destroyed the MSF-supported hospital in Haydan in October then went on to bomb another MSF facility in south-western Taiz in December and the Shiara Hospital in the Razeh district of Saada in January.
Arab coalition air strikes have hit rebel positions across northern Yemen as well in as the southwestern province of Taez as ground fighting raged.
A USA aerial attack on an MSF-run hospital in Afghanistan last October killed 42 people.
On Saturday, an airstrike on a school killed at least 10 children and wounded dozens more, Yemeni officials and aid workers said.
“Even if the fighting ended soon, whoever assumes control over the shattered country will face an AQAP with far more resources and recruits than the AQAP against which previous Yemeni governments have struggled”, said a June intelligence assessment put out by the Soufan Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy based in NY.
The coalition denied this, saying instead it had bombed a camp at which Iran-backed rebels were training underage soldiers.
MSF asks all parties, and particularly to the Saudi-led coalition responsible for the attack, to guarantee that such attacks do not happen again.
Yemen is embroiled in a deadly civil war with rival forces battling for control of the country.
Amnesty International condemned the attack in a statement that said the targeting of medical facilities could constitute “a serious violation of international humanitarian law, which would amount to a war crime”.
“We call on all parties to cease hostilities immediately”, Trudeau said.
MSF is active in 11 hospitals and health centres, and provides support to another 18 hospitals and health centres in eight governorates of Yemen, including Aden, Al-Dhale’, Taiz, Saada, Amran, Hajjah, Ibb and Sana’a.
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At the time of the airstrike, MSF said there were 23 patients in the surgery ward, 25 in the maternity ward, 13 newborns and 12 patients in the pediatric ward. The number of patients in the emergency room at the moment of the strike is pending further clarification.
