A suspected Saudi-led airstrike killed at least 13 people at a wedding in a rebel-held town in Yemen, witnesses and the rebels said yesterday, even as UN peace efforts made headway.
There was no immediate comment from the Saudi-led coalition, which has come under mounting criticism from human rights groups for the civilian death toll from the bombing campaign it has waged against the rebels since March.
It was the second alleged coalition strike on a Yemeni wedding party in just over a week.
Photo: Reuters
The raid hit a house where dozens of people were celebrating the wedding on Wednesday evening in the town of Sanban, 100km south of the capital Sana’a, residents said.
“Coalition warplanes launched the attack. The house was completely destroyed,” local resident Taha al-Zuba said. “Warplanes were heard in the area ahead of the attack.”
The rebels’ al-Masirah television said on Twitter that the wedding was hit by “aggression warplanes,” referring to the coalition.
Medical sources said 38 people were also wounded.
Last month, a suspected coalition strike killed at least 131 civilians at a wedding near the Red Sea city of Mokha, which the UN said might have been the deadliest hit since March. The coalition denied involvement.
The latest strike came as the UN announced that the rebels, who control the capital and much of central and northern Yemen, had accepted a UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to the seven-month conflict.
The rebels’ refusal to agree to abide by the resolution passed in April — demanding their withdrawal from all the territory they have seized since they overran the capital in September last year — had stymied previous peace efforts.
Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled into exile in neighboring Saudi Arabia in March but whose forces have since recaptured much of the south with the support of Saudi-led ground troops, had refused to join UN-brokered peace talks until the rebels signed up.
However, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric announced in New York on Wednesday that both the rebels and their allies had confirmed they were willing to enter talks based on the UN resolution.
“This is an important step,” he said.
The Shiite Houthi rebels, whose heartland is in the mountains of the far north, were only able to capture so much of the country because of the support of renegade troops still loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abullah Saleh.
Human rights watchdogs have repeatedly criticized the Saudi-led coalition’s air strikes in Yemen, saying they have hit areas without any military targets.
In late August, an airstrike hit a bottled water factory in the northern province of Hajja, killing 17 civilians and 14 rebels.
Warplanes in July struck staff residences at a power plant in the Red Sea port of Mokha, killing 65 civilians, while an April raid on a dairy plant in the port of Hodeida further north left 35 civilians dead.
The rebels too have come under heavy criticism from human rights groups for “indiscriminate” shelling of civilian-populated areas.
A Western-backed resolution calling for a UN investigation into abuses committed during the conflict in Yemen was withdrawn due to protests from Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch said last week.
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