Daily Times

Forty children were among 51 people killed in a Saudi-led coalition air strike on a bus in rebel-held northern Yemen, the Red Cross said Tuesday, after thousands protested at a mass funeral.

Fifty-six children were also among the 79 people wounded in the Thursday strike on Saada province, a rebel stronghold that borders Saudi Arabia, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a new toll.

The child deaths have been an embarrassment for Western governments which supply the coalition with warplanes and other weapons and have sought to prevent the conduct of the war being scrutinised too closely.

The coalition has promised an internal inquiry but analysts and aid groups have voiced doubt it is ready to provide the transparency and accountability demanded by the wider international community.

The new casualty toll came after a mass funeral was held for many of the dead children on Monday at which thousands vented anger against Riyadh and Washington.

Mourners raised pictures of the children and shouted slogans against Saudi Arabia and its ally and key arms supplier, the United States. The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 as Huthi rebel fighters closed in on the last bastion of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’s government.

The conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people since then — the vast majority of them civilians — and caused what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The UN Security Council called on Friday for a “credible” investigation into the deadly strike.

But it stopped short of demanding an independent inquiry as urged by UN chief Antonio Guterres after past probes failed to lead to any significant reduction in the high civilian death toll from the coalition’s more than three-year bombing campaign.

Published in Daily Times, August 15^th 2018.