SANA’A (Dispatches) – Two people were killed and two others wounded on Wednesday when Saudi-led coalition airstrikes hit a building under construction in Yemen’s capital Sana’a, Yemen’s al-Masirah TV reported.
The airstrikes also destroyed a factory for producing plastic materials, al-Masirah reported.
Both sites under attack are located in northern Sana’a.
Meanwhile, the coalition announced it targeted what it claimed to be sites used by resistance fighters for storing and firing “bomb-laden drones, including a building under construction used as a secret factory for assembling the drones,” the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV reported.
The development came hours after Saudi-led fighter jets conducted more than a dozen aerial assaults against al-Jubah and Sirwah districts in Yemen’s central province of Ma’rib, but no reports about possible casualties were quickly available.
On Tuesday evening, seven civilians, including an African refugee, suffered grave injuries when Saudi border guards indiscriminately fired shots at popular outdoor markets and residential buildings in Raqou area of the Monabbih district in the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the U.S. and other key Western powers, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah resistance movement.
Having failed to reach its professed goals, the war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there.
A new report has predicted that the death toll from Yemen’s war will reach 377,000 by the end of the current year, including those killed as a result of indirect and direct causes.
In a report published on Tuesday, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that 70 percent of those killed would be children under the age of five.
It found that 60 percent of deaths would have been the result of indirect causes, such as hunger and preventable diseases, with the remainder a result of direct causes like front-line combat and air raids.