Rights group: All sides in Yemen may be guilty of war crimes

The Saudi-led alliance began its air strikes in late March as the Shi’ite Houthis entered Aden.

With the backing of the Saudi-led coalition, Hadi’s loyalists have in recent weeks made significant gains in Yemen, retaking the strategic city of Aden as well as driving the Houthis from the southern provinces of Lahj, Al-Dalea and Abyan.

The bombing has been more or less continuous, with multiple ceasefire agreements and so-called humanitarian pauses breached nearly as soon as they were announced.

Saudi Arabia and its allies have been carrying out air raids against the Houthi militia, loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, since 26 March.

Tuesday’s airstrikes on the Red Sea port of Hodeida, about 90 miles southwest of Sana, destroyed or damaged storage hangars, cargo containers, loading cranes, docking facilities and at least one vessel, officials and witnesses 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. There is no official death toll but tens of Saudi soldiers have been reportedly killed by Houthi attacks.

Houthi and allied forces have repeatedly violated global humanitarian law including by firing weapons indiscriminately into civilian populated areas in southern Yemen and across the border in Saudi Arabia, and recruiting children for their forces. The Yemeni war is experiencing some changes as reports quoting military officials on the ground stated that modern combat vehicles and tanks are being used by pro-Hadi forces.

This comes as Arab coalition warships have been reported to be waiting off the coast of the western city of Al-Hudaydah.

A bomb attack in the governor’s office in the southern port city of Aden on Thursday killed four people, Yemeni security officials said.

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. With commercial imports accounting for 90 percent of Yemen’s food and fuel supplies, the coalition-imposed blockade may amount to starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, a war crime.

The Houthis overran the capital Sanaa last September and went on to seize most of the country.

Dislodging the group will be far more hard now because Yemen’s military has disintegrated during the conflict, said Adam Baron, a Yemen analyst and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

An average of eight children are killed or maimed every day in Yemen as a direct result of the conflict that has gripping the country since April, according to a new report released on Wednesday by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).