Saudi coalition strike ‘kills family of four’ in Sanaa

Elderly woman and three children die after coalition air raid hits residential area in Yemen’s capital, activist says.

Aftermath of Saudi led air strike in Sanaa
UN ranks Yemen's war as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises [H Albukhaiti/Al Jazeera]

At least four civilians, including three children, have been killed after a Saudi-led coalition air strike tore through a residential area in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

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Hussain Albukhaiti‏, an activist based in Sanaa, told Al Jazeera on Friday afternoon that three people were still missing from the late-night raid that struck the south of the city.

“Four members of the al-Mahdi family, including an elderly woman and her three young grandchildren, were killed after their house was struck with an air strike shortly after midnight,” Albukhaiti said.

He said there was no military installation near the site of the attack and no reported activity by Houthi fighters, whom the coalition are battling.

“There’s been no cessation in hostilies from the Saudis since the start of Ramadan. For the past two weeks, every night, we’ve had planes hovering in the skies until the early hours.”

“We have no idea what they’re doing – whether it’s reconaissance or intelligence gathering – but civilians are continually being killed.”

This is the latest in a series of air strikes to target civilians since Saudi Arabia, along with a coalition of other Arab states, intervened in Yemen in March 2015.

In August last year, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), one of handful of international aid groups operating on the ground in Yemen, evacuated its staff from the north of the country after a coalition air strike hit a health facility operated by the group, killing 19 people.

READ MORE: Over 3,000 Saudi strikes on Yemen ‘hit civilian areas’

And in September, a report by the Yemen Data Project, a group of security and human rights researchers, found that more than a third of air strikes hit civilian sites including schools, hospitals and mosques.

Out of the more than 8,600 air raids examined, the report found that 3,577 were listed as hitting military sites and 3,158 non-military, while 1,882 strikes were classified as unknown.

According to the UN, more than 10,000 people have been killed and 2.8 million driven from their homes by fighting across the country.

Yemenis search for their belongings among the rubble in Sanaa [Hussein Albukhaiti/Al Jazeera]
Yemenis search for their belongings among the rubble in Sanaa [Hussein Albukhaiti/Al Jazeera]
Source: Al Jazeera