A Saudi air strike appears to have struck a livestock market in southern Yemen, killing more than 40 people – one of the deadliest bombings of a campaign that has now lasted three months.
The blast happened while civilians were trading in the market in the Fayyoush district of Lahj province. The Associated Press reported that the death toll was at least 45, with more than 50 wounded.
“I came right after the explosion and saw dozens of dead strewn about and a sea of blood, while the wounded were being evacuated to nearby hospitals,” resident Abu-Ali al-Azibi told the AP. “[There was] blood from people mixed with that of the sheep and other livestock at the market.”
A Saudi-led coalition launched an air offensive in March after Houthi rebels, who are backed by Iran, took control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and moved on the city of Aden to the south, forcing the Saudi-backed president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.
That month, more than two dozen people died in an attack on a refugee camp and 46 people were killed and hundreds wounded in a raid in April on the Faj Attan district in Sana’a.
More than 3,000 people have been killed and 14,300 wounded in Yemen since the war began.
The air campaign has had limited success and instead has plunged Yemen into a humanitarian crisis with food, fuel and medical shortages. Last week, the UN declared Yemen a level-three emergency, its most dire rating, placing it on par with Syria. It estimates that a million people been displaced since March.
Two leading human rights watchdogs said the Saudi-led coalition was failing to adhere to international law and was not taking the necessary precautions to prevent civilian casualties.
“The cases we have analysed point to a pattern of attacks destroying civilian homes and resulting in scores of civilian deaths and injuries,” said Donatella Rovera, a senior adviser at Amnesty International, in a statement last week following an investigation into eight attacks by the coalition.
“There is no indication that the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition has done anything to prevent and redress such violations,” she said.
Human Rights Watch said it had documented a series of apparently unlawful air strikes on the Houthis’ home province of Sa’ada, including on residential houses, markets, a school and a petrol station.
“The coalition’s aerial bombing of Sa’ada killed dozens of civilians, devastating entire families,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and north Africa director at HRW, last week. “These attacks appear to be serious laws-of-war violations that need to be properly investigated.”