HRW: Saudi-led Coalition Airstrikes Violatied ’Laws of War’
Local Editor
The Human Rights Watch [HRW] organization said on Tuesday that Saudi-led coalition air strikes on Yemen’s city of Saada have destroyed houses, markets and a school, killing dozens of people in what could amount to war crimes, saying also that one of the coalition’s assertions is a clear violation of the ’laws of war’.
HRW said in its report that: "On May 8, a coalition spokesman announced that the entire city of Saada was a military target. This not only violated the laws-of-war prohibition against placing civilians at particular risk by treating a number of separate and distinct military objectives as a single military target, but possibly also the prohibition against making threats of violence whose purpose is to instill terror in the civilian population".
The New York-based rights group said also that it had investigated the attacks on the northern city of Sadaa and found that at least 59 people had died in a month, from April 6 to May 11, including 14 women and 35 children.
Satellite imagery showed over 210 impact locations in the city, damaging or destroying hundreds of buildings, the HRW report said.
Six houses were hit in Saada, as were an empty school, a cultural center, five markets and a petrol station crowded with motorists, the report said.
In one of the deadliest incidents, a bombing raid on May 6 killed 27 members of one family, including 17 children.
Attacks on houses alone have killed 51 people, all of them civilians, according to the HRW, which dispatched two researchers to the city recently last month [May] to interview witnesses.
"Not only were these attacks unlawful because of the apparent absence of any military target, but they contributed to civilian hardship in the city, where people are suffering from shortages of food, water, and fuel," the report further said.
Meanwhile, HRW called on the Saudi-led coalition to investigate the attacks that have apparently targeted civilians and would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law.
A Saudi-led coalition, backed by the United States, has been attacking Yemen since March 26 - without a UN mandate.
The aggression has killed more than 2,000 civilians, displaced more than a million and led to severe shortages of food, water, fuel and electricity.
The US-led Saudi military aggression began in an attempt to bring the fugitive former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who is a close ally of Saudi Arabia, back to power, and to weaken the Houthi Ansarullah movement which is currently responding to the Saudi attacks on the country.
