Nine more Yemeni civilians fall victim to Saudi airstrikes

Nearly a dozen people have lost their lives when Saudi military aircraft carried out two airstrikes against a residential area in Yemen’s western coastal province of Hudaydah as the Riyadh regime pushes ahead its devastating aerial bombardment campaign against its crisis-hit southern neighbor.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that the fighter jets struck a number of houses in Sharjah area of al-Garrahi district on Sunday afternoon, leaving nine civilians, including five women, dead.

Separately, Yemeni army forces and allied fighters from Popular Committees launched a salvo of artillery rounds at the position of Saudi troopers in Raqabah al-Salah area of the kingdom’s southwestern border region of Najran, located 844 kilometers (524 miles) south of the capital Riyadh, killing and injuring scores of them.

Yemeni artillery units and their allies also launched separate attacks against Jabal al-Dukhan, Hamezah village and al-Qern base in the same Saudi region, causing extensive damage in the targeted areas.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in 2015. Much of the country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The Saudi-led war has also triggered a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.

According to the World Health Organization’s latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April 2017 and is suspected to have infected 841,906.

In November 2017, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, said more than 11 million children in Yemen were in acute need of aid, stressing that it was estimated that every 10 minutes a child died of a preventable disease there.

Additionally, the UN has described the current level of hunger in Yemen as “unprecedented,” emphasizing that 17 million people were food insecure in the country.

The world body says that 6.8 million, meaning almost one in four people, do not have enough food and rely entirely on external assistance.

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