Daily Times

Flooding and lightning strikes in Yemen have killed eight civilians, an official and a doctor told AFP on Saturday, underscoring the threat of extreme weather in the war-ravaged country. The lightning strikes occurred on Friday in the Al-Layha and Al-Zahra districts of Hodeida governorate on the Red Sea coast, said Hamza Saied, a doctor at the hospital in Al-Layha. “Six women and a man were killed, and three others were injured,” he said. The area is controlled by Huthi rebels who seized the capital in 2014, prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene the following year and setting in motion a brutal conflict that has created what the United Nations describes as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Also on Friday, flooding killed one woman and destroyed dozens of homes in the nearby town of Hais, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media. Hais is located in territory controlled by the internationally recognised government based in the southern city of Aden. Extreme weather has displaced more than 200,000 people in Yemen so far this year, “many of whom had already been displaced multiple times”, the UN Population Fund reported earlier this week.