Yemen

AMSTERDAM/TAIZ, YEMEN—Airstrikes carried out yesterday by the Saudi-led coalition hit a clinic in southern Yemen run by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and wounded nine people, including two MSF staff members. According to local sources, at 11:20 a.m. local time on December 2, three airstrikes targeted a park in Taiz city's Al Houban district, about two kilometers from MSF's tented clinic. The MSF team immediately evacuated the Al Houban clinic and informed the Saudi-led coalition that their jet planes were mounting an attack nearby. The clinic itself then came under attack.

In the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula, more than 1,300 people living with HIV/AIDS are receiving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, around half of them in the capital, Sana’a. With the outbreak of war in March 2015, ensuring the continuity of the treatment is a critical challenge.

Fighter jets from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) bombed multiple sites in Yemen on Sunday in a series of airstrikes that came after dozens of soldiers from the Saudi-led coalition were killed by a rebel missile attack on Friday.

The ongoing air strikes and deliberate targeting of civilians and healthworkers in Yemen are jeopardising humanitarian operations in the country, denying thousands of people basic medical care, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned.

Houthi forces and southern armed groups have committed serious abuses at a hospital in Yemen’s port city of Aden, forcing its evacuation in late April 2015.