SAUDI-LED AIRSTRIKES KILL DOZENS OF YEMENI CHILDREN
The bus had been travelling through a busy market in Dahyan district, in northern Yemen, a rebel stronghold. It was Thursday afternoon and the bus carrying children was heading back from a picnic when the driver stopped to get a drink, according to Save the Children.
It was at that moment when an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Shiite rebels hit, killing at least 50 people and wounding 77, according to rebel Health Ministry figures.
“Scores killed, even more injured, most under the age of 10,” Johannes Bruwer, head of delegation for the International Committee for the Red Cross in Yemen, stated in a Twitter post.
The Saudi-led coalition, meanwhile, insisted it was a “legitimate military action” against the rebels, known as Houthis, who had fired a missile at the kingdom’s south, killing one person and wounding 11 others.
In the aftermath of Thursday’s attack, Yemen’s rebel-run Al Masirah TV aired dramatic images of wounded children, their clothes and schoolbags covered with blood as they lie on hospital stretchers. The Red Cross said on Twitter that its team at an ICRC-supported hospital in Saada received the bodies of 29 children, all under 15 years old. It also received 48 wounded people, including 30 children, it said.
One video showed a boy covered in dirt trying to stand up and seemingly unable to move.
“My leg won’t get up,” he told the man behind the camera.
“No excuses anymore,” Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF’s regional director in the Middle East and North Africa, said on Twitter. “Does the world really need more innocent children’s lives to stop the cruel war on children in Yemen?”
Mohammed Abdul-Salam, a Houthi spokesman, accused the coalition of showing a “clear disregard for civilian life” by targeting a crowded public place.
“It is high time for these relapsing tragedies to stop in Yemen,” said Robert Mardini, the ICRC’s regional director. “No one should allow putting children in harm’s way and making them pay such an unacceptable price.”
The strike was a relatively high single-day death toll for the war, which has so far claimed the lives of about 10,000 people, crippled the country’s health system and damaged its infrastructure.
U.S.-BACKED COALITION DEFENDS ATTACK ON MARKETPLACE THAT HIT BUS COMING FROM PICNIC, WOUNDING 77
JERUSALEM Israeli aircraft struck more than 150 targets in Gaza in response to a barrage of rockets from the Palestinian territory, its military said Thursday, marking a sharp escalation even as negotiations were taking place over a ceasefire.
Militants in the strip fired more than 180 rockets and mortars into Israel within 24 hours, the Israeli military said. At least 11 Israelis were injured. In the airstrikes that followed, three Palestinians were killed, including a 23-year old pregnant woman and her 18-month-old daughter, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.