25 people killed in airstrike near Yemen’s capital, Houthi official says

Airstrikes hit homes in a village near Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 30 others, mostly women and children, a spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry said.

Speaking to The Associated Press, Anees Alasbahi accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes on al-Shariya. The AP could not independently verify the claims, and Saudi Arabia’s Information Ministry did not immediately reply to an AP request for comment.

The toll reflected the rapid worsening of Yemen’s civil war, where a yearslong truce fell apart over the summer. Fighting has escalated between the Iranian-backed Houthis — who control Sanaa, the north and the west of the country — and their Saudi-backed opponents based in the south and east.

On Friday, an airstrike in a market in southern Yemen killed at least 30 people, according to Houthi officials. The Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed military each blamed the other for that strike.

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Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV of the aftermath of Saturday’s strikes showed staff carrying limp bodies of multiple young children out of ambulances at a local hospital. One little girl’s head had been cleaved open. Other children lay on stretchers, bloodied and bandaged as staff tended to them.

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Footage from the farming village — located in Houthi-ruled territory about 15 kilometers (10 miles) northeast of Sanaa — showed the rubble of destroyed houses and dust filling the air as people hid in nearby agricultural fields.

Alasbahi told Al-Masirah at least 25 people were killed, up from a toll of 22 he gave earlier to the AP. He told the channel that civilians were still buried under the rubble of houses hit in the strikes, and that subsequent strikes targeted emergency workers as they tried to pull survivors out of the wreckage.

Footage showed one wounded man covered in dust and wearing a first responder’s orange vest being helped out of an ambulance.

The renewal of fighting has raised fears that Yemen will be dragged back into the horrors of a civil war that has dragged on for more than a decade and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

The war began when the Houthis stormed out of the north in 2014 and seized the capital, driving out the internationally recognized government. Saudi Arabia assembled a coalition backing the government, waging a yearslong campaign of air bombardment that brought it international condemnation over civilian deaths.

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The war has killed at least 150,000 people, according to the U.N., along with widespread deaths from hunger and disease outbreaks. The lines of control in the country changed little for years, and a truce was reached in 2022.

The relative quiet, however, collapsed over the summer when the Houthis launched new offensives in response, they said, to Saudi Arabia’s continued blockade of their territory. The rebels made a lightning advance capturing much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and strategic islands in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. At the same time, they have stepped up strikes on Saudi Arabia, targeting oil and military infrastructure and shipping in the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, the Saudi-led coalition has said it has been carrying out airstrikes in Houthi-held territory, targeting the rebels’ military infrastructure. The heaviest ground fighting has centered around Taiz, a strategic, government-held southern city that the Houthis have now encircled, worsening an already dire humanitarian situation among civilians. Residents are struggling to secure drinking water and food supplies as the Houthis restrict movement into the city.
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Abou AlJoud reported from Beirut.