Red Cross: Yemen prison airstrike killed, injured over 100
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - A Saudi-led airstrike targeting a prison run by Yemen's Houthi rebels killed and injured over 100 detainees on Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said, part of a pounding aerial offensive that also took the Arab world's poorest country off the internet.
Basheer Omar, an ICRC spokesperson in Yemen, told The Associated Press that rescuers continued to go through the prison site in Saada province, controlled by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis.
'œThe toll is likely to increase, unfortunately," Omar said. The Red Cross had moved some of the wounded to a facility in another province, he said. There was no breakdown for how many were killed and how many were wounded.
The airstrike early on Friday came as another airstrike in the port city of Hodeida apparently took Yemen entirely off the internet.
NetBlocks said the internet disruption began around 1 a.m. local and affected TeleYemen, the state-owned monopoly that controls internet access in the country. TeleYemen is now run by the Houthis who have held Yemen's capital, Sanaa, since late 2014.
Yemen faces 'œa nation-scale collapse of internet connectivity" after an airstrike on a telecommunications building, NetBlocks said.
The San Diego-based Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis and San Francisco-based internet firm CloudFlare also noted a nationwide outage affecting Yemen beginning around the same time.
Over 12 hours later, the internet remained down.
The Houthi's Al-Masirah satellite news channel said the strike on the telecommunications building had killed and wounded people. It released chaotic footage of people digging through rubble for a body as gunshots could be heard. Aid workers assisted bloodied survivors.
There was no immediate independent confirmation of how many people were hurt in the Hodeida attack.
The Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthi rebels acknowledged carrying out 'œaccurate airstrikes to destroy the capabilities of the militia'ť around Hodeida's port. It did not immediately acknowledge striking a telecommunication target as NetBlocks described, but instead called Hodeida a hub for piracy and Iranian arms smuggling to back the Houthis.
The coalition also did not acknowledge the Saada strike.
The undersea FALCON cable carries internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. The FALCON cable has another landing in Yemen's far eastern port of Ghaydah as well, but the majority of Yemen's population lives in its west along the Red Sea.
A cut to the FALCON cable in 2020 caused by a ship's anchor also caused widespread internet outages in Yemen. Land cables to Saudi Arabia have been cut since the start of Yemen's civil war, while connections to two other undersea cables have yet to be made amid the conflict, TeleYemen previously said.
A Saudi-led coalition entered Yemen's war in 2015 to try and restore the impoverished country's internationally recognized government, ousted by the Houthis the year before. The war has turned into the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with international criticism of Saudi airstrikes that have killed hundreds of civilians and targeted the country's infrastructure. The Houthis meanwhile have used child soldiers and indiscriminately laid landmines across the country.
The war reached into the United Arab Emirates, a Saudi ally, on Monday when the Houthis claimed a drone and missile attack on Abu Dhabi, killing three people and wounding six.
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