Airstrikes Hit Homes Near Sanaa, Killing 25, Houthi Health Ministry Says

Updated: Death toll revised to 25

The Houthi-run Health Ministry spokesman, Anees Alasbahi, has revised the death toll from the strikes on al-Shariya village to at least 25 people, up from the 22 he gave earlier, the Associated Press reported. The wounded figure is unchanged at 30. Alasbahi told Al-Masirah that civilians were still buried under the rubble of houses hit in the strikes and that subsequent strikes targeted emergency workers as they tried to pull survivors out of the wreckage. The Associated Press said it could not independently verify the claims, and Saudi Arabia's Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Airstrikes hit homes in a village near Yemen's capital, Sanaa, on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 30 others, a spokesman for the Houthi-run Health Ministry said. Most of those killed and wounded in al-Shariya village, in Sanaa province, were women and children, the spokesman, Anees Alasbahi, told the Associated Press.

Alasbahi accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes. The Associated Press said it could not independently verify the claims, and Saudi Arabia's Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Saudi authorities had not commented on the report in the separate account carried by AFP and Reuters either. Readers should treat the toll and the claim about who carried out the strikes as reported by one side in the war, not as independently confirmed facts.

What Houthi media reported

Houthi media first reported a toll of 22. The group's Saba news agency said Saudi strikes killed 22 people, among them women and children, in homes in the Al-Shariyah area of Sanaa province, and wounded dozens more. Saba described the dead in a statement as "Martyrdom of citizens, among them women and children, in Saudi enemy airstrikes".

Saba said work to recover victims from the rubble was still going on, and it claimed aircraft had targeted paramedics with two strikes. That claim also came from Houthi media alone and was not independently verified. Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV showed staff carrying the limp bodies of young children out of ambulances that had brought casualties to a local hospital, the Associated Press reported.

A second deadly attack in two days

The Sanaa strikes came one day after an attack on a market in southern Yemen killed at least 30 people. Houthi officials said three strikes hit al-Hadara market in the al-Waziyah district of Taiz province at about 7 a.m. on Friday, killing at least 30 people and wounding eight. For that attack, the two sides gave opposite accounts. The Houthis blamed Saudi airstrikes. Forces backing Yemen's internationally recognised government blamed a Houthi ballistic missile and denied that any airstrikes took place in the area. The Associated Press said it could not verify either account of the market attack.

Taken together, the reported tolls from the two attacks in two days come to at least 55 people killed and 38 wounded, based on the figures given by Houthi officials to the wire services. Both sets of figures rest on statements from the Houthi-run health authorities.

A war that resumed in July

Yemen slipped back into war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government in July, after years of relative calm, AFP and Reuters reported. Since then, Saudi Arabia has regularly bombed Houthi positions, while the group has multiplied its attacks against the kingdom. Saudi Arabia said on Saturday that its air defences had shot down a Houthi cruise missile that was targeting the capital, Riyadh.

The Associated Press said Saturday's toll reflected the rapid worsening of Yemen's civil war, in which a yearslong truce fell apart over the summer. By Saturday afternoon, neither the Sanaa death toll nor the claim about who carried out the strikes had been independently verified, and Saudi Arabia had issued no public response to the accusation.