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Saudi jets kill Yemenis amid cholera outbreak

Saturday, 08 October 2016 10:59 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 08 October 2016 1:53 PM ]

Yemenis inspect the rubble of a school destroyed in a Saudi airstrike in the northwestern Sa’ada Province, September 14, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

New Saudi airstrikes against various areas across Yemen have taken the lives of seven more civilians, while Yemeni counteroffensives saw a missile being fired at the kingdom’s southwest.

On Saturday, one person was killed after Saudi warplanes targeted his moving truck in Sa’ada Province in Yemen’s remote northwest, Yemen’s al-Masirah television reported.

Saudi aircraft killed six others, including four children, in an airstrike hitting the western province of al-Hudaydah.

Meanwhile, the Yemeni army’s missile unit hit military bases in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan region with a Qaher missile. The Saudi side confirmed the retaliatory strike, claiming it had intercepted the projectile.

In the same region, Yemeni forces carried out a mortar attack, killing a number of Saudi servicemen, and Yemeni snipers were reported to have targeted another Saudi military personnel member.

Separately, the Yemeni army engaged the Saudi mercenaries siding with Yemen’s former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi — who has resigned and fled the capital, Sana’a — in the southern Yemen province of Aden, killing two of the mercenaries and injuring four others.

Forces loyal to former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi hold a position during fighting west of the city of Ma’rib in west-central Yemen, June 27, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Saudi Arabia has been waging a military campaign against Yemen since March 2015 to restore power to Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh. The United Nations (UN) said in late August that more than 10,000 people had lost their lives since the campaign began.

Cholera outbreak

Yemen is, meanwhile, grappling with a severe food shortage amid a naval blockade imposed by Riyadh, which prevents shipments to most of its ports. According to the UN’s children agency, there are 370,000 children enduring severe malnutrition in the already-impoverished nation, and 1.5 million are going hungry.

On Friday, the UNICEF and the World Health Organization said war-torn Yemen was also suffering from a cholera outbreak, posing a further threat to infants in the country.

“This outbreak adds to the misery of millions of children in Yemen,” UNICEF’s Yemen representative, Julien Harneis, said in a statement. “Children are at a particularly high risk if the current cholera outbreak is not urgently contained especially since the health system in Yemen is crumbling as the conflict continues.”

The WHO, citing Yemeni Health Ministry figures, said eight cholera cases, mostly involving children, had been recorded in one neighborhood in Sana’a only.

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