Houthis claim Saudi strikes killed 33 in Yemen, including 13 children

SANAA: Houthi authorities said on Sunday that Saudi strikes killed 33 people, many of them women and children, in Yemen's Sanaa province, as deaths mount in the country's revived civil war.

The United Nations says more than 1,600 people have been killed and more than 300,000 displaced since fighting resumed in the impoverished country.

The death toll from the Saudi-led coalition's strikes on Al-Shariya village located east of Yemen's capital Sanaa has risen to 33, with 39 people wounded, Houthi health ministry spokesman Anees Alasbahi said in a post on X.

The Houthis' Saba news agency said on Saturday that operations to recover victims from the rubble were ongoing and that "aircraft targeted paramedics with two strikes."

"According to the near-final figures, the dead include 12 men, 8 women and 13 children, while the injured include 16 men, 10 women and 13 children," Alasbahi said.

The Iran-backed group's Al-Masirah TV broadcast footage that it said was filmed in Al-Shariya, showing smoke rising from a struck site, piles of debris and wounded people in hospital.

Saudi Arabia, fighting in Yemen in support of the internationally recognised government, has not commented on the report.

The Saudi-led coalition in a statement on Saturday said it had intercepted and destroyed a Houthi missile launched towards Riyadh province.

The Houthis, meanwhile, said they had launched multiple missile and drone attacks against Saudi troops and infrastructure both in the Gulf kingdom and Yemen.

The group said six operations targeted Aramco oil facilities, Riyadh airport and Saudi military positions on both sides of the border, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree posted on X.

On Friday, an attack on a market in Taiz province killed 30 people. The Houthis said Saudi airstrikes were to blame, while Yemen's government forces accused the Iran-backed group of having fired a ballistic missile at the site.

Yemen slipped back into war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government in July after years of relative calm, opening a new front in the conflict in the Middle East.

Since then, Saudi Arabia has regularly bombed Houthi positions, while the group has multiplied its attacks against the oil-rich kingdom.--AFP