Yemen: More than 200 dead and wounded after an air strike on a prison | To whom

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More than 200 people are feared killed or injured after an air strike on a prison in Yemen, and at least three children were killed in separate bombing, in a dramatic blackmail of the country’s long conflict.

Houthi rebels released horrific video footage on Friday showing corpses under the rubble and torn bodies from an attack on the prison, which destroyed buildings in the prison located in the heart of the northern province of Saada.

Save the Children said children in the southernmost port city of Hodeidah died when air strikes by Saudi-led coalition forces hit a communications facility while they were playing nearby.

“It was reported that children were playing on a nearby soccer field when the rockets landed,” Save the Children said. There was also an internet blackout across the country.

The attacks come five days after the Houthis entered the seven-year war to a new stage by announcing an attack with drones and missiles on Abu Dhabi that killed three people.

The United Arab Emirates, which is part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels, has threatened revenge.

Aid workers said hospitals were overwhelmed in Saada after the prison attack, with one of them receiving 200 wounded, according to Doctors Without Borders.

“There are more than 100 dead and wounded…the numbers are rising,” Bashir Omar, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen, told AFP. Other sources said 60 were killed.

Ahmed Mahat, MSF’s head of mission in Yemen, said: “There are still many bodies at the site of the airstrike, and many missing people. It is impossible to know the number of dead. It appears to have been a horrific act of violence.”

The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to meet, Friday, in an emergency session on the Houthi attacks on the UAE, at the request of the Gulf state, which has occupied one of the non-permanent seats on the council since January 1.

The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting the rebels since 2015, in an intractable conflict that has displaced millions of Yemenis and brought them to the brink of starvation.

The coalition claimed responsibility for the attack in Hodeidah, the port of life for the shattered country, but did not say it had carried out any strikes on Saada.

The official Saudi Press Agency said the coalition had carried out “precision air strikes…to destroy the capabilities of the Houthi militia in Hodeidah.”

Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when the Houthis descended from their base in Saada to capture the capital, Sanaa, prompting Saudi-led forces to intervene in support of the government the following year.

Tensions have risen in recent weeks after the UAE-backed Giants Brigade expelled the rebels from Shabwa governorate, undermining their months-long campaign for control of the main city of Marib in the north.

Yemen’s civil war has been a disaster for millions of citizens who have fled their homes, many on the verge of starvation in what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations estimated that the war had killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, directly and indirectly through starvation and disease.

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