10 killed in rocket attack on Yemen’s Taez: UN

Kidnapped Red Cross worker freed

GENEVA, Oct 4, (Agencies): At least 10 civilians were killed Monday, including six children, when an artillery shell hit a busy street near a popular market in Taez in southern Yemen, the UN said Tuesday.

The United Nations rights office also said 17 people, including six more children and three women, were injured in the attack on Monday evening in the Bir Basha area of Taez, allegedly carried out by affiliates of the Houthi rebels.

Military and medical sources had previously put the civilian toll from the attack at six dead and eight wounded.

UN rights office spokesman Rupert Colville cited witnesses saying that “the street where the market was located was crowded with people at the time of the attack.”

The witnesses, who spoke with UN rights office staff, had insisted “there had not been any armed confrontations between warring parties in the Bir Basha area prior to this terrible incident,” he said.

Taez, Yemen’s third largest city, is almost completely surrounded by the Iran-backed Shiite rebels and their allies, backers of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

UN humanitarian aid chief Stephen O’Brien on Tuesday described as “absolutely devastating” the sight of Yemeni children suffering malnutrition as a result of the country’s 18-month conflict.

Speaking to reporters in rebel-held Sanaa as he concluded a two-day visit, O’Brien said he had visited a hospital in the Red Sea city of Hodeida where he met “very small children affected by malnutrition”.

“It is of course absolutely devastating when you see such terrible malnutrition,” he said, hailing the efforts of relief agencies trying to meet the “very severe needs” for food in the country.

“We need to do more. We need to do everything we can to meet the very large scale of needs which are here in Yemen,” he said, in his first visit since August last year.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF says nearly three million people in Yemen are in need of immediate food supplies, while 1.5 million children suffer malnutrition, including 370,000 enduring very severe malnutrition that weakens their immune system.

Secretary-General Dr Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani meets UN envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, in Riyadh yesterday. During the meeting, they discussed the latest developments in Yemen in addition to means to promote UN and international communitys efforts for completing the Yemeni peace talks in Kuwait. Al-Zayani reiterated the GCC states support to the efforts of the UN envoy for the success on the peace talks in accordance with the Gulf initiative, outcomes of the national dialogue and the UN security council’s resolution 2216.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis toughened demands for the resumption of talks to end the 19-month-old civil war, saying President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi must go and an agreement must be reached on the presidency.

The comments from the Iran-aligned forces are likely to complicate United Nations efforts to bring the parties back to talks based on proposals made by US Secretary of State John Kerry in August.

Hadi’s internationally-recognized government, which is supported by an alliance of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, is battling the Houthis who took over the capital Sanaa in September 2014.

Also:

DUBAI: A Red Cross worker kidnapped 10 months ago in Yemen was freed on Monday and taken to neighbouring Oman, Omani state news agency ONA and the ICRC said.

French-Tunisian, Nourane Houas, a staff member of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Sanaa, had been kidnapped along with a Yemeni man by unidentified gunmen who intercepted their vehicle in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

The man was released hours later but Houas held in an unknown location.

ONA quoted an Omani foreign ministry official as saying France had asked Oman to try to locate her.