Saudi warplanes have conducted an airstrike on Yemen’s northwestern province of Hajjah, leaving 11 members of a family dead or injured, in the second attack on the province in less than 24 hours.
Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported that the airstrike hit the home of a civilian named Ahmed Mohammad Tamri in the district of Abs in Hajjah in the early hours of Monday.
Preliminary reports said that a woman was killed and eight others, most of them children, were injured in the aerial attack.
Al-Masirah’s reporter later said the number of the injured rose to at least 10, noting that seven of them were children aged between 18 months and 14 years.
‘War Crime’
The attack drew condemnation from a senior Yemeni official, who decried it as “a war crime”.
Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, stressed that the ongoing targeting of the Yemeni people is “a war crime and deliberate terrorism.”
The airstrike came as the Yemeni army on Sunday thwarted an attack by the Saudi-led coalition forces on Hajjah’s district of Harad near the border with Saudi Arabia while liberating a mountainous area from the control of the Riyadh-backed mercenaries.
Over 160 ceasefire violations in Hudaydah’
Al-Masirah cited a security source as saying that the Saudi-led coalition committed some 163 ceasefire violations in Yemen’s western coastal province of Hudaydah on Sunday. The violations included six spy flights and 54 artillery attacks.
The attacks came in violation of the Stockholm Agreement that was reached in December 2018 following peace negotiations between representatives from Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement and Riyadh-backed mercenaries loyal to Yemen’s former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur.
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The document set out three undertakings, which include a ceasefire along the Hudaydah front and the redeployment of armed forces out of the city and its port; an agreement on prisoner exchange; and a statement of understanding on the southern Yemeni city of Ta’izz.
The Ansarullah movement has said they expected the Stockholm Agreement to lead to peace, but instead, Saudi Arabia has continued to violate the UN-backed agreement, killing and injuring thousands of Yemenis ever since.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies – including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – launched a brutal war against Yemen in March 2015.
The war was launched to eliminate the Ansarullah movement and reinstall former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
Accompanied by a tight siege, the war has failed to reach its goals, while killing hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people. The UN refers to the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The Saudi-led war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories.
Meanwhile, Yemeni forces have continued to grow stronger in the face of the Saudi-led invaders, advancing toward strategic areas held by Saudi-led mercenaries, including Ma’rib province, and conducting several rounds of counterstrikes against Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
