Over 300 civilians reported killed in Yemen since August

GENEVA — United Nations human rights officials expressed alarm last week at a sharp rise in civilian casualties in Yemen since peace talks collapsed last month, the great majority of them inflicted in airstrikes by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

At least 329 civilians have been killed, and at least 426 have been injured since the beginning of August. Fighting resumed after Aug. 6, when talks collapsed between the Saudiled coalition supporting Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and forces aligned with Houthi rebels supported by Iran who control the capital and large portions of the country.

The toll was reported as Saudi Arabia and Arab allies waged a diplomatic campaign at the U.N. Human Rights Council to stave off an international investigation into the conduct of hostilities and possible war crimes.

Heavy Saudi pressure on Western governments and businesses succeeded in stalling a similar initiative in the council last year. They add that growing awareness of the bloodshed has made it harder for the United States and Britain, Saudi Arabia’s major suppliers of arms and munitions, to look away.

An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition on a market and residential area of the city of Hodeidah on Wednesday has been the most vivid example of the carnage. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack, which killed at least 26 civilians, according to human rights monitors.

“The death toll could be much higher,” Cecile Pouilly, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva on Friday. Ten days earlier, two coalition airstrikes had reportedly killed 21 civilians, including a group of men drilling for water.

The U.N. documented at least 41 attacks on civilian facilities like clinics, schools and markets by both coalition and rebel forces in August, killing at least 180 people, Ms. Pouilly said, a 40 percent increase on the casualties in July, when parties to the conflict were still in talks.

The charity Doctors Without Borders announced last month that it was pulling staff members out of six hospitals in Yemen after coalition planes bombed a facility, killing 19 people and injuring 24, the fourth time that hospitals supported by the group had come under attack by the coalition since the start of the war in March 2015.

The U.N. also voiced concern over the effects of a blockade of the city of Taiz, enforced by popular committees aligned with the Houthi rebels, leaving residents critically short of food and water, Ms. Pouilly said, and causing a near total collapse of health services.