7 Killed in Saudi Airstrike on Yemeni Hospital: Rights Group
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A hospital in a rural area of northwest Yemen was hit by a recent Saudi-led airstrike, killing seven people and wounding eight others, Save the Children said.
The international aid organization, which supports the hospital, said in a statement sent to the Associated Press on Tuesday that four of those killed were children and two adults are unaccounted for.
The organization said the hospital had been open for half an hour and many patients and staff were arriving on a busy morning.
Among the dead were a health worker and the worker's two children and a security guard, it said.
Save the Children, which reported earlier this week that 37 Yemeni children a month had been killed or injured by foreign bombs in the last year, demanded an urgent investigation into the attack.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the organization's chief executive, said, "We are shocked and appalled by this outrageous attack."
"Innocent children and health workers have lost their lives in what appears to have been an indiscriminate attack on a hospital in a densely populated civilian area," she said. "Attacks like these are a breach of international law."
Thorning-Schmidt said the hospital is one of many Save the Children supports in Yemen, "but time after time, we see a complete disregard by all warring parties in Yemen for the basic rules of war."
UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock has said about 80 percent of Yemen's population – 24 million people – need humanitarian assistance including nearly 10 million "just a step away from famine" and nearly 240,000 "facing catastrophic levels of hunger."
Saudi Arabia’s air campaign against Yemen started in 2015, without a United Nations mandate, in a bid to restore power to the country’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.