At least eight women and two girls heading home from a wedding have been killed in an air attack in central-west Yemen, a health official has told Al Jazeera.
Saba news agency, aligned with Yemen’s Houthi group, cited a security source as saying that the women’s vehicle was struck by three Saudi-led coalition air raids late on Saturday.
The attack reportedly took place at around 11pm local time (20:00 GMT) in the Harib al-Qaramish district of the Marib governorate, east of the capital, Sanaa, where the wedding had taken place.
So far, the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels has not commented on the alleged air attack.
Mohammad al-Sheab, head of the health bureau in Marib, told Al Jazeera that the victims were all from the Haysan family. He said the women were between 30 to 50 years old, without providing an age for the two girls.
In a post on Twitter, Mohammad Abdel Salam, spokesperson for Ansar Allah, the political arm of the Houthis, called the attack a “massacre”.
In previous tweets, Abdel Salam also accused the Saudi-led coalition of carrying out “three bloody massacres in [the towns of] Taiz, Saada and Hodeidah” over the weekend. He added that more than 70 people were killed in those attacks.
Humanitarian catastrophe
Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition at war in Yemen since March 2015, when the oil-rich Kingdom intervened to push back Houthi rebels and allied troops, and reinstate the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Despite being mired in the war for more than two years, the coalition has so far failed to achieve its stated aims as Houthi rebels continue to hold Sanaa and control the country’s north.
The war has taken a huge toll on Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country.
More than 10,000 civilians have been killed, and millions of Yemenis have been left without basic necessities.
Last week,the UN warned that some 8.4 million people “are a step away from famine” in Yemen, which is already battling a massive cholera epidemic.
[SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS]
