Saudi Arabia Can't Get Enough, Kills 17 More Yemeni Civilians

By teleSUR

17 August 16

As people rushed to help survivors at the family home after the first airstrike, the Saudi-led coalition attacked the same house a second time.

fter killing at least 18 people in two separate airstrikes over the past three days, the Saudi coalition killed at least 17 more civilians Tuesday, most of them women and children, in two airstrikes on a family home in the east of the capital Sanaa.

Health officials in Sanaa confirmed that 17 bodies had been taken to local hospitals after the airstrikes on a village in Nehem District, northeast of the capital, the New York Times reported Tuesday, while Reuters said earlier in the day that at least nine people had been killed.

The deadly attack took place in the village of Al Madeed against the family house of Shayef Muhsin Asem, who lived in the house but was out at the time of the attack. He told the New York Times that “after the house was bombed, family members rushed in to try to rescue survivors when a second airstrike hit.”

The attack comes just a day after the Saudi-led coalition attacked a Doctors Without Border-run hospital in Yemen's northern Hajja province, killing at least 11 people and wounding 13.

The attack on the hospital came after Saudi planes attacked a school in Saada province Saturday, killing 10 children.

Saudi Arabia said the school it targeted was a “training camp” for child soldiers, suggesting it was not the coalition’s responsibility that children were killed.

"When jets target training camps, they cannot distinguish between ages," coalition spokesperson General Ahmed Assiri told AFP Sunday. However, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF concluded in an investigation that most of those killed were six to eight years old.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the two earlier attacks Tuesday and called for an investigation, which the coalition announced Tuesday. However, while the investigation will supposedly be independent, its members are from countries in the 12-nation coalition. Also, Abs Hospital was the fourth Doctors Without Borders facility in Yemen to be attacked since March 2015, and Ban said 70 health centers had been damaged or destroyed by one side or the other.

Meanwhile, Saudi state television reported that seven civilians were killed Tuesday by projectiles fired by Yemen's Houthi group on the southern Saudi city of Najaran, in one of the deadliest cross-border attacks on the kingdom.

More than 6,500 people have been killed, over half of them civilians, since the Saudi-led coalition began its assault on Yemen in March 2015. The coalition of Arab states intervened in the country after Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa and ejected the former government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Mansour Hadi.

Saudi Arabia reacted angrily to a decision in June to blacklist the coalition after a U.N. report found the alliance responsible for 60 percent of the 785 deaths of children in Yemen last year. Ban had said he took Saudi Arabia off the list after its government threatened to cut off funding to U.N. aid programs.