More than 140 people were killed and more than 525 wounded when airstrikes hit a funeral ceremony in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, a senior UN official has said, as Houthi rebels blamed the attack on the Saudi-led coalition.
The dead and wounded include senior military and security officials from the ranks of the Shia Houthi rebels fighting the internationally recognised government of president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi as well as their allies, loyalists of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
In the aftermath of the strike on Saturday, hundreds of body parts were found strewn in and outside the hall. Rescuers collected them in sacks. “The place has been turned into a lake of blood,” said one rescuer, Murad Tawfiq.
Ambulances rushed to the site to ferry the wounded to hospitals. In radio broadcasts, the health ministry summoned off-duty doctors and called on residents to donate blood. Rescuers, meanwhile, sifted through the rubble in search of more casualties but a fire hindered their efforts.
The funeral was for Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the interior minister Galal al-Rawishan, an ally of both the Houthi movement and their chief ally, Saleh.
Witnesses and medics said a missile hit the hall in the south of the capital, destroying the building. They described ambulances ferrying casualties from the scene, where a plume of black smoke rose into the sky.
The Houthi-controlled news site sabanews.net said: “Dozens of citizens fell as martyrs or were wounded in this attack by planes of the Saudi-American aggression.”
There was no immediate comment from the Saudi-led coalition.
Saudi Arabia intervened in March 2015 to support the Yemeni government against Houthi rebels in control of Sana’a. It has faced repeated accusations that its campaign has breached international humanitarian law, and last month the Guardian published data indicating that more than a third of the coalition’s airstrikes had hit civilian sites such as school buildings, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.
The Houthi rebels are also accused of human rights violations, including the use of landmines and indiscriminate shelling.
The UN has put the death toll in the 18-month war at more than 10,000, many of them civilians. Dozens of emaciated children are also fighting for their lives in Yemen’s hospital wards, as fears grow that the war and a sea blockade are creating famine conditions in the Arabian peninsula’s poorest country.
More than half of Yemen’s 28 million people are already short of food, the UN has said, and children are particularly badly hit, with hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation. There are 370,000 children enduring severe malnutrition that weakens their immune system, according to Unicef, and 1.5 million are going hungry.
