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A Saudi-led airstrike targeting a prison run by Yemen’s Houthi rebels killed and wounded over 100 detainees on Friday, rescuers said, part of a pounding aerial offensive that hours earlier saw another airstrike take the Arab world’s poorest country off the internet.
Houthi rebels killed and wounded over 100 detainees on Friday, rescuers said, part of a pounding aerial offensive that hours earlier saw another airstrike take the Arab world’s poorest country off the internet.
A strike in the port city of Hodeida, later confirmed by satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press, hit a telecommunication center there that’s key to Yemen’s connection to the internet. Airstrikes also hit near Sanaa, Yemen’s capital held by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels since late 2014.
The intense campaign comes after the Houthis claimed a drone and missile attack that struck inside the capital of the United Arab Emirates earlier in the week.
Basheer Omar, an International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson in Yemen, gave the casualty figure to the AP. He said rescuers continued to go through the prison site in the northern city of Saada, also controlled by the Houthis.
The organization Save the Children said over 60 were killed in Saada, describing the prison holding detained migrants.
“The initial casualties report from Saada is horrifying,” said Gillian Moyes, Save the Children’s country director in Yemen. “Migrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Yemeni civilians injured by the dozens, is a picture we never hoped to wake up to in Yemen.”
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis did not immediately acknowledge the strike in Saada.
On Thursday, the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was alarmed at the ongoing airstrikes in Sanaa, Hodeida and other locations in Yemen, as well as separate shelling attacks. The body’s special envoy to Yemen, Hans Grundberg, ended a visit to Riyadh on Thursday that was meant to discuss the spike in hostilities with Saudi and exiled Yemeni government officials. /Compiled from wires
