SANAA (Dispatches) – Three children and more than 70 people were killed and more than 200 others injured in airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, according to aid organizations and Yemeni officials on Friday.
At least three children are among the dozens of people killed in the past day, the humanitarian organization Save the Children said in a statement. It noted that “the true number is feared to be higher.”
In recent days, Saudi Arabia and its allies have ramped up airstrikes following a retaliatory attack on Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates on Monday.
The United Arab Emirates is part of the Saudi-led military coalition that has been waging a destructive war on Yemen for more than six years. On Monday night more than a dozen people were killed in two coalition airstrikes on a home in Sanaa.
On Tuesday, Israel’s extremist prime minister Naftali Bennett offered the occupying regime’s “security and intelligence support” to the United Arab Emirates following the retaliatory attack in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi.
“Israel stands with the UAE. I stand with [Crown Prince] Muhammad bin Zayed,” he said, adding he had “ordered the Israeli security establishment to provide their counterparts in the UAE with any assistance” that could help to protect against future attacks.
Internet was down across most of Yemen on Friday, adding to civilians’ distress as they attempted to contact friends and relatives.
An overnight airstrike targeted communications infrastructure in the port city of Hudaydah and also killed three children playing soccer nearby, said Amjad Yamin, the media, communications and advocacy director for Save the Children.
More than 70 adults were then killed early Friday morning when another airstrike hit a detention center in the northern city of Sa’da. The toll is climbing rapidly, Yamin said, as rescue workers clear the rubble.
“To wake up to this level of civilian death toll is honestly horrifying,” he said.
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders said in a statement that Al-Gumhourriyeh Hospital in Sa’da has received 138 wounded in the attack and recorded 70 deaths. “They are so overwhelmed that they can’t take any more patients,” the statement said.
“It is impossible to know how many people have been killed,” Ahmed Mahat, head of the organization’s Yemen office said in a statement. “It seems to have been a horrific act of violence.”
Mutahar Almarwani, director general of the health office in Sanaa, said the detention center was targeted early Friday morning. He also said death toll was expected to rise.
The Saudi-led coalition did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the strikes, and did not put out a statement on Hudadah or Sa’da. But on Friday it did issue a statement on military operations in the contested province of Ma’rib, saying it had conducted 28 targeted operations against Yemeni forces over the past 24 hours, destroying 13 military vehicles and killing over 90 fighters.
Gruesome scenes came to light in Sa’da as rescue workers pulled bodies from destroyed prison buildings and piled up mangled corpses.
Further south in Hudaydah, video footage showed bodies in the rubble and dazed survivors.
Muhammad Ali al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, said the airstrikes amount to a “war crime” and are “not forgivable.”
Hudaydah Governor Muhammad Ayyash Qahim said the latest airstrike exhibited the level of the Saudi-led coalition’s despair and frustration.
“The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and their mercenaries will be held to account for the crimes they have perpetrated against ordinary citizens,” he added.
Qahim said such acts of aggression will not deter Yemeni people from mobilizing forces and participating in the fight against Saudi-paid mercenaries.
The UN has estimated the Saudi war on Yemeni killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease.