Saudi raid on Yemen teachers, senseless bloodshed: UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has condemned Saudi Arabia’s latest deadly airstrike on a teachers’ office in the northwestern Yemeni province of Amran, describing the attack as an act of bloodshed.

“A selfless activity turned in a moment into senseless bloodshed,” UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement on Wednesday.

On August 18, the Saudi air raid targeted a building housing offices for a teachers’ union in Amran, killing 17 civilians, including 13 teaching staff and four children, while injuring 20 others, according to local medical sources.

“The educators were gathered together to prepare exams for thousands of children who had missed the end of their school year because of this brutal conflict. Working after hours, they had brought their children with them, some of whom were playing outside when the bomb exploded,” the UNICEF statement read.

In an earlier report titled “Yemen: Childhood Under Threat,” the UNICEF said an average of eight children are killed or wounded every day as a direct result of the conflict in Yemen.

The report also said almost 400 children have lost their lives and nearly 600 others sustained injuries since Saudi Arabia launched an aggression against Yemen over four months ago.

Saudi Arabia launched its aggression against Yemen on March 26 – without a UN mandate – in an effort to undermine Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and to restore power to the country’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.

The UN says the conflict in Yemen has killed nearly 4,500 people, many of them civilians, since late March. Local Yemeni sources, however, say the fatality figure is much higher.