Airstrikes hit homes in a village near Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Saturday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 30 others, mostly women and children, a spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry said.
Anees Alasbahi accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes on al-Shariya. The AP could not independently verify the claims, and Saudi Arabia’s Information Ministry did not immediately reply to an AP request for comment.
The toll reflected the rapid worsening of Yemen’s civil war, where a yearslong truce fell apart over the summer. Fighting has escalated between the Iranian-backed Houthis — who control Sanaa, the north and the west of the country — and their Saudi-backed opponents based in the south and east. On Friday, an airstrike in a market in southern Yemen killed at least 30 people, according to Houthi officials.
The Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed military each blamed the other for that strike. Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV of the aftermath of Saturday’s strikes showed staff carrying limp bodies of young children out of ambulances, bringing the casualties to a local hospital.
One little girl’s head had been cleaved open. Other children lay on stretchers, bloodied and bandaged as staff tended to them. Footage from the village showed the rubble of destroyed houses and dust filling the air as people hid in nearby agricultural fields.
Alasbahi said in a posting earlier on X that Saturday’s strikes hit several homes in al-Shariyah. Subsequent strikes targeted emergency responders, he said.
In September, the Houthis made a lightning advance, capturing much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and strategic islands in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. They have also encircled the city of Taiz, a strategic gateway to southern Yemen. At the same time, they have stepped up strikes on Saudi Arabia, targeting oil and military infrastructure and shipping in the Red Sea.
The comments by the spokesman of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard came days after the country’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, warned that “any kind and level of threat” from the US or Israel would face a response without geographic limits. Asked at a Tehran press conference about the limit on missile ranges, Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said, “That restriction has been lifted for us. “He did not say whether Iran had missiles capable of exceeding the limit, saying only Iran would “demonstrate these capabilities in practice” rather than make statements. Iran is not known to have missiles that can go beyond the 2,000-kilometre (1,200-mile) limit — a range that puts parts of Greece and the Balkans, the entire Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and most of Egypt within reach.
However, US officials have said technology from Iran’s space program can be repurposed to build intercontinental ballistic missiles.