Children among 14 dead in new air strike on Yemen capital
The United Nations has accused the Arab coalition of killing 42 civilians in the week to Thursday, including many children.
Yemenis stand in the rubble of a residential building destroyed in an air strike in the southern Faj Attan district of the capital, Sanaa, on August 25, 2017
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The attack was the latest in a wave of deadly raids on residential areas of Yemen blamed on a Saudi-led Arab military coalition, drawing strong international condemnation.
Friday's air raid destroyed two buildings in the southern district of Faj Attan, leaving people buried under debris, said an AFP photographer on the scene.
The images he took showed severely damaged buildings, piles of smashed concrete blocks and splintered beams of wood.
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Medics at the site said at least 14 people including six children and two women had died in the strike at 3:15 am (0015 GMT).
Al-Massira television channel run by the Shiite Huthi rebels who control the capital said those killed were all civilians, and blamed the Saudi-led coalition for the strike.
Mohammed Ahmad, who lived in one of the buildings, said he was among those who had taken nine bodies to a hospital.
"We extracted them one by one from under the rubble," he said. "Some of them were children from a single family."
"When the rocket hit, one of the buildings was immediately destroyed which caused the building next door to collapse too. Some residents got out, but others were trapped."
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Some of them died and others were wounded, he told AFP.
Diggers were still working at the site hours after the raid as medics and residents searched for the missing. Survivors sat on the rubble and helped move the wounded to ambulances.
A man wearing a bloodied white gown walked among the torn and burnt pieces of clothing and bits of wooden furnishings.
Series of strikes
The coalition entered Yemen's war in 2015 in support of the government against the Iran-backed rebels, who seized Sanaa the previous year after forming a fragile alliance with troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
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The World Health Organization estimates nearly 8,400 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led alliance intervened.
Friday's raid came two days after at least 35 people died in a series of strikes on Sanaa and a nearby hotel that rebels have also blamed on the coalition.
Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki told AFP that those killed in Wednesday’s air strike were "armed militants", adding that the strike was aimed at "a high-value target".
On Friday's strike, he said: "I will review the information."
Human rights groups have repeatedly criticised the coalition, which controls Yemen's airspace, over the civilian death toll from the bombing campaign.
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Northern and southern Yemen have both come under aerial attack in recent months, and the coalition has come under massive pressure from international organisations including the United Nations over the raids.
The United Nations has said the coalition was likely responsible for a July attack on the southwestern Taez province that killed 20 people, including children.
"In the week from August 17 to August 24, 58 civilians have been killed, including 42 by the Saudi-led coalition," UN human rights office spokeswoman Liz Throssell told reporters in Geneva on Friday.
"In all these cases, in which civilians were killed and injured, witnesses said that there had been no warnings that an attack was imminent," her agency said.
Yemen also faces a deadly cholera outbreak that has claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected more than half a million people since late April.
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A combination of war, disease and a coalition blockade have pushed Yemen, long the poorest in the Arab world, to the brink of famine.
The United States also regularly conducts deadly drone strikes on Yemen that Washington says target Al-Qaeda.
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