SAUDI-LED AIRSTRIKES KILL SCORES AT PRISON IN YEMEN

The 7-year-old war in Yemen intensified again Friday when airstrikes by the Saudi-led military coalition on northern Yemen killed at least 70 people and knocked out the entire country’s Internet, according to international aid groups and the rebels who control the area.

Capping a week in which rebel drones struck as far away as Abu Dhabi and Saudi bombs rained down across rebel-held northern Yemen, the hostilities were fresh proof of the conflict’s obstinacy a year after President Joe Biden took office vowing to bring the war — and one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters — to an end.

After months of territorial gains by the Houthis, the Iran-backed rebels who control northern Yemen, forces backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have managed to claw back some territory and shift the momentum of the war. Those offensives have snarled international efforts to push the two sides toward peace.

Friday’s strikes, which hit targets across Houthicontrolled territory including a prison and damaged the country’s Internet infrastructure, raised the risk of heating things up even further.

In the northern city of Saada near the Saudi border, where an airstrike destroyed a temporary detention facility, the Republic Hospital had received around 70 dead and 138 wounded and could not take any more, said Ahmed Mahat, head of Doctors Without Borders’ mission in Yemen. Two other hospitals in the city were flooded with growing numbers of injured patients, even as their medical supplies thinned, Doctors Without Borders said.

Yahya Shaim, a health official for Saada, said in a phone interview that the number of casualties had risen to 267 — 77 dead and 190 injured.

“There are many bodies still at the scene of the airstrike, many missing people,” Mahat said in a statement, citing a Doctors Without Borders colleague in Saada. “It is impossible to know how many people have been killed.”

Local media linked to the Houthis blamed the Saudiled coalition that has been fighting the Houthis since 2015.

The coalition ramped up attacks over the last week after the Houthis attacked a major airport in the United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia’s chief partner in the coalition — with drones and missiles Monday, killing three people and wounding six.

Another coalition airstrike early Friday hit a telecommunications hub in the port city of Hodeida, severely damaging critical Internet infrastructure and plunging Yemen into an Internet blackout, said a telecommunications ministry official.