Amnesty demands UN probe into alleged Yemen war crimes
Yemen has been wracked by conflict since March, when the Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes against the rebels as they advanced on the main southern city of Aden, after seizing the capital in September.
Besides advancing from the south, coalition-backed forces are also fighting the Houthis and Saleh’s troops on a second front around Marib, northeast of Sanaa.
“Every family in Yemen has been affected by this conflict”, worldwide Committee of the Red Cross president Peter Maurer said earlier this month.
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have repeatedly expressed concern that both the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi-allied forces were violating the laws of war and not doing enough to prevent or minimize civilian casualties.
Amnesty global blamed all sides for causing the killing and maiming of noncombatants, but focused its latest investigation on eight coalition airstrikes in and near Taiz and Aden that it said had killed 141 civilians, children among them, and ground fighting that killed an additional 68 noncombatants.
According to the BBC, Saudi-led airstrikes are being carried out since March 26 against the Houthi militia that is loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Heavy fighting between government loyalists and rebels for Yemen’s third city Taez has left more than 80 people dead in the past 24 hours, military sources said.
“Perpetrators of the callous attacks against civilians in Yemen need to know that they will pay the price and will be held responsible for war crimes,” Rovera said.
Mines and unexploded ordnance have caused similarly high death tolls in Aden itself since the rebels’ pullout last month, with dozens of civilians reported killed and hundreds wounded.
One air raid on a school in Amran province north of Sanaa on Tuesday killed 13 teachers and four children, in an attack the United Nations called “senseless bloodshed”.
At least 207 civilian objects have been completely or partially destroyed as a result of the armed conflict.
More than 2.5 million children under the age of 15 are at risk of contracting measles, while nearly 2 million are likely to suffer from malnutrition this year, almost one million more than in 2014, UNICEF said. With commercial imports accounting for 90 percent of Yemen’s food and fuel supplies, the coalition-imposed blockade has had a severe impact on the humanitarian situation, and may amount to the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. It has spread disease and hunger throughout the country creating a humanitarian disaster.