The entire members of two Yemeni families have been killed in separate Saudi Arabian-led airstrikes on residential areas in Yemen.
Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported that all members of a family, including the father, mother, and their two children, were killed when their house was targeted in a Saudi-led airstrike in the Azreqein neighborhood in the capital, Sana’a, in the early hours of Thursday.
It added that two other civilians were also killed in the same airstrike, which also wounded six people, including three children.
Late on Wednesday, Saudi-led fighter jets also killed a single parent and her four children in an airstrike against a residential area in the town of Dhahian in the northern province of Sa’ada, al-Masirah said in a separate report.
According to Yemen’s official Saba news agency, Saudi-led warplanes carried out at least 16 airstrikes on several provinces in the war-torn Yemen over the past 24 hours. In one incident, the coalition aircraft hit a residential area in Sa’ada with banned cluster monitions, killing a child and wounding a couple.
Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war on Yemen in March 2015 in support of the country’s former Riyadh-friendly government. The war has killed and injured over 600,000 civilians, according to the Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights.
In one of the deadliest air raids, Saudi warplanes last month targeted a wedding ceremony in Hajjah several times, killing almost 50 people and wounding 55 others. Saudi jets also carried out raids on the ambulances transporting the casualties to local hospitals.
Late on Wednesday, Yemeni army forces, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, launched a domestically-made short-range Badr-1 ballistic missile against a military base in Saudi Arabia’s southern region of Najran in a retaliatory strike, al-Masirah reported, citing an unnamed security source.
A few hours earlier, the Yemeni forces had fired several domestically-made Burkan 2-H (Volcano H-2) ballistic missiles at “economic targets” in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, the report said, saying all missiles successfully hit their designated targets.
Saudi authorities later claimed that air defense systems had intercepted the missiles in the skies over the capital.
Saudi Arabia often claims that it intercepts incoming Yemeni missiles, but a close study of evidence by The New York Times last year clearly suggested that in one of the most high-profile of such Yemeni missile attacks, the projectile, launched deep into Saudi territory, had in fact landed unimpeded, bypassing American-made Patriot missiles and potentially other defenses used by Riyadh. Saudi Arabia claimed that it had foiled that attack, which targeted the Riyadh airport.
The Saudi-led coalition has also blockaded the already-impoverished country. The United Nations says a record 22.2 million people in Yemen are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.