Nearly Two Dozen Civilians Dead in Saudi Airstrikes on Yemen

Date: 17 November 2017 - 21:09

News ID: ۴۶۵۳۷

SANAA (Dispatches) – Nearly two dozen civilians have lost their lives and several others sustained injuries when Saudi fighter jets carried out two separate attacks in Yemen as the Saudi regime presses ahead with its devastating aerial bombardment campaign against its impoverished southern neighbor.
Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that at least 17 civilians were killed on Friday afternoon as Saudi military aircraft struck a commercial neighborhood in the al-Jaar area of Abs district in Yemen's northwestern province of Hajjah.
Search and rescue teams have reportedly arrived in the area. The overall death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured victims are in a critical condition.
Earlier in the day, six civilians were killed and eight others wounded when a Saudi airstrike targeted a bus carrying passengers along a road in the Khamis al-Wa’izat area of Az Zuhrah district in the western coastal province of al-Hudaydah.

Saudi War ‘Stupid’

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has described Saudi Arabia’s long-running war on Yemen as "stupid,” saying the blockade on the impoverished country must come to an end.
Speaking to reporters, the UN chief’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Guterres had written a letter to Saudi Arabia’s UN envoy Abdallah al-Mouallimi, asking the Riyadh regime and its allies to reopen Yemen's sea and airports as well as borders.
"The secretary general is very much disappointed that we have not seen a lifting of the blockade," said Dujarric, underscoring Guterres’ frustration with Saudi officials’ disregard for international calls to remove the siege.
Guterres and his top aid officials are "heartbroken at the scenes we are seeing from Yemen and the risk of continued suffering of the Yemeni people," Dujarric added.
"This is a man-made crisis," he said of the unprovoked military campaign that has killed over 12,000 Yemenis since it began in March 2015, noting that Guterres had called it a "stupid war."
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia announced that it was shutting down Yemen’s air, sea, and land borders, after Yemeni fighters targeted an international airport near the Saudi capital.
This is while the UN has listed Yemen as the world's number one humanitarian crisis, where 17 million people are in dire need of food, seven million of whom are facing famine.
The war has also forced one of the world's worst outbreaks of cholera upon the impoverished country, killing over 2,200 people and leaving nearly one million people more infected.
Meanwhile, a prominent international charity group says an estimated 130 children or more are losing their lives every day in Yemen due to "extreme hunger and disease,” warning the situation will deteriorate unless a crippling blockade imposed on the impoverished nation by a Saudi-led military coalition is lifted immediately.
"Without urgent, unhindered access for humanitarian organizations and an increase in funding, Save the Children is warning half of these children will most likely go without treatment,” said the UK-based group in a report on Thursday, warning that "if left untreated, approximately 20-30 percent of children with severe acute malnutrition will die each year.”