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More than 100 detainees were killed and injured on Friday in a Saudi-led airstrike on a prison run by Houthi rebels in Yemen, rescuers said, hours after another airstrike left the Arab world’s poorest country without internet part of a violent air raid.
Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press later confirmed that a strike in the port city of Hodeida had struck a telecommunications center there, key to Yemen’s internet connection. The airstrikes also hit near Yemen’s capital Sanaa, which has been held by Iran-backed Houthi rebels since late 2014.
The fierce campaign began after the Houthis claimed to have carried out drone and missile strikes in the United Arab Emirates capital earlier this week.
Basheer Omar, the ICRC spokesman in Yemen, provided casualty figures to The Associated Press. He said rescue workers continued through the prison in the northern city of Saada, which is also controlled by the Houthis.
“Unfortunately, charges may increase,” Omar said. The Red Cross will move some of the wounded to facilities elsewhere, he said. There is no breakdown of how many were killed and how many were wounded.
In a separate statement, Médecins Sans Frontières said the number of injured alone was “about 200”.
“According to my colleagues in Saada, there are still many bodies at the site of the airstrike and many people are missing,” Ahmed Mahat, head of the group’s mission in Yemen, said in a statement. “It’s impossible to know how many people were killed. It seems like a horrific act of violence.”
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis did not immediately acknowledge the strike in Saada.
As for the Hodeidah airstrike that apparently took Yemen completely offline, NetBlocks said the internet outage began around 1 a.m. local time and affected TeleYemen, the state-owned monopoly that controls internet access in the country. TeleYemen is now run by the Houthis, who have controlled Yemen’s capital Sanaa since late 2014.
Yemen faces “a nationwide collapse in internet connectivity” following an airstrike on a telecommunications building, NetBlocks said.
The San Diego-based Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis and San Francisco-based internet company CloudFlare also pointed to nationwide outages that began affecting Yemen around the same time.
More than 12 hours later, the internet is still down. The Norwegian Refugee Council denounced the strike as a “blatant attack on civilian infrastructure, which will also affect our aid delivery.”
The Houthis’ Al-Masirah satellite news channel said there were casualties in the attack on the telecommunications building. It posted chaotic images of people digging up bodies in the rubble as gunfire could be heard. Rescuers help bleeding survivors.
There was no immediate and independent confirmation of how many people were injured in the Hodeida attack.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels admitted conducting “accurate airstrikes to destroy the militia’s capabilities” around the port of Hodeida. It did not immediately admit to attacking the telecommunications targets described by NetBlocks, but said Hodeidah was a hub for piracy and Iranian arms smuggling in support of the Houthis. Iran has denied supplying weapons to the Houthis, but UN experts, independent analysts and Western countries point to evidence that Tehran is involved in the weapons.
The submarine FALCON cable transmits the Internet to Yemen via the port of Hodeida along the Red Sea for use by TeleYemen. The FALCON cable also has another landing point at the port of Ghaydah in Yemen’s far east, but most of Yemen’s population lives in the western part of the Red Sea coast.
In 2020, the cut of the FALCON cable caused by an anchor also caused widespread internet outages in Yemen. TeleYemen has previously said that the overland cable to Saudi Arabia has been cut since the civil war began in Yemen, while connections to the other two submarine cables during the conflict have not been established.
The Saudi-led coalition entered Yemen’s civil war in 2015 to try to restore power to the impoverished country’s internationally recognized government, which had been overthrown by the Houthis the previous year. The war has turned into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with international criticism of Saudi airstrikes that have killed hundreds of civilians and targeted the country’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Houthis are using child soldiers and indiscriminately laying landmines throughout the country. To date, an estimated 110,000 people – combatants and civilians – have been killed in the conflict.
The war spread to the United Arab Emirates, an ally of Saudi Arabia, on Monday when the Houthis claimed a drone and missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed three people and wounded six others. Although the UAE has largely withdrawn its troops from the conflict, it remains active in the war and supports local militias in Yemen.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was alarmed by the ongoing airstrikes and separate shelling in Sana’a, Hodeidah and other parts of Yemen. The agency’s special envoy to Yemen, Hans Grundberg, on Thursday wrapped up a visit to Riyadh to discuss the intensification of hostilities with Saudi and exiled Yemeni government officials.
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