A senior official has condemned recent attacks by the Saudi-led coalition fighting in war-torn Yemen, which killed a number of civilians in the northern part of the country.
“In the course of the years-long war against the people of Yemen, it has become clear that whenever the aggressors suffer defeat at the war front, they take blind revenge on innocent Yemeni women and children by intensifying the air raids,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said in a statement Wednesday.
One airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a wedding party in the province of Saada on Tuesday, killing 11 civilians and wounding 11 others, a local security official said.
The attack targeted the ceremony in Ghafirah village of al-Thahir district, the official said, speaking to Xinhua by phone on condition of anonymity. He said most of the victims were women and children.
Criminal Record
“The aggressors added a new page to their war crimes,” Qasemi said, denouncing the “inhuman” attack.
In 2015, a coalition of Arab forces led by Riyadh and supported by Washington began a military intervention in Yemen that has been locked in a civil war for three years.
The coalition, as a matter of policy, always denies attacking civilians, insisting that its airstrikes are only targeted at the Houthi fighters.
The war has killed thousands of people, displaced millions and pushed the country—already the poorest in the Arab world — on the verge of hunger, famine and full-fledged humanitarian crises.
Carnage
The United Nations decried on Tuesday the impact that the war in Yemen is having on children.
“Since 2015, more than half of health facilities have stopped working, and 1,500 schools have been damaged due to air strikes and shelling,” said Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, Al Jazeera reported.
“There is no justification for this carnage,” she said, regretting that many children had been taken out of school, married off, hungry or dying from preventable diseases.
So far, UNICEF estimates that 2,200 children have been killed and 3,400 others injured but these only refer to the cases that the world governing body was able to verify, Fore said, adding that the actual figures might be higher.
The official said there were fears that Yemen’s healthcare and education would collapse, with international humanitarian aid the only option remaining to alleviate people’s suffering and avoid a full-blown catastrophe.
