Airstrikes kill more than 2 dozen people near Yemen's capital, Houthis say

CAIRO (AP) — Airstrikes hit homes in a village near Yemen's capital, Sanaa, on Saturday, killing at least 27 people and wounding 36 others, mostly women and children, a spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry said.

Speaking to The Associated Press, Anees al-Asbahi said the death toll is expected to rise as search and rescue efforts continue and accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes on al-Shariya. Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesperson, claimed in a statement later Saturday that the group had carried out attacks against Saudi Arabia in response to the strikes on the village as well as another deadly attack Friday on a market in southwestern Yemen.

The AP could not independently verify the Houthis' claims, and Saudi Arabia’s Information Ministry did not immediately reply to AP requests for comment.

Saturday's toll reflected the rapid worsening of Yemen’s civil war, where a yearslong truce fell apart over the summer. Fighting has escalated between the Iranian-backed Houthis — who control Sanaa, the north and the west of the country — and their Saudi-backed opponents based in the south and east.

On Friday, an airstrike in a market in southern Yemen killed at least 30 people, according to Houthi officials. The Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed military each blamed the other for that strike.

Images show young children among the wounded

Footage from Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV showed hospital staff carrying limp bodies of multiple young children from ambulances after Saturday's strikes. One little girl's head had been cleaved open. Other children lay on stretchers, bloodied and bandaged as staff tended to them.

Footage from the farming village — located in Houthi-ruled territory about 15 kilometers (10 miles) northeast of Sanaa — showed the rubble of destroyed houses and dust filling the air as people hid in nearby agricultural fields.

Al-Asbahi told Al-Masirah that civilians were still buried under the rubble of houses, and that subsequent strikes targeted emergency workers as they tried to pull survivors out of the wreckage. Footage showed one wounded man covered in dust and wearing a first responder's orange vest being helped out of an ambulance.

The war in Yemen is escalating, raising fears of hunger and disease

The renewed fighting has raised fears that Yemen will be dragged back into the horrors of a civil war that has lasted for more than a decade and created one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.

The war began when the Houthis stormed out of the north in 2014 and seized the capital, driving out the internationally recognized government. Saudi Arabia assembled a coalition backing the government, waging a yearslong campaign of air bombardment that brought it international condemnation over civilian deaths.

The conflict has killed at least 150,000 people, according to the U.N., along with widespread deaths from hunger and disease outbreaks. The lines of control in the country changed little for years, and a truce was reached in 2022.

The relative quiet, however, collapsed over the summer when the Houthis launched new offensives in response, they said, to Saudi Arabia's continued blockade of their territory. The rebels made a lightning advance capturing much of Yemen's Red Sea coast and strategic islands in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. At the same time, they have stepped up strikes on Saudi Arabia, targeting oil and military infrastructure and shipping in the Red Sea.