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 The sorties show the coalition is determined to use its air power
to push back the Houthis, Yemen's dominant group, a day after
medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said coalition
bombing destroyed one of its hospitals late on Monday - a charge the
alliance denied.
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries have been bombing the
Houthis and supporting militias opposed to them since late March. At
least 5,600 people have been killed, but the alliance has made
little headway toward restoring Yemen's exiled government to the
Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa.
Taiz, Yemen's third largest city, has become a major front in the
coalition's northward push toward the capital. Coalition planes have
dropped weapons to Islamist militias fighting artillery and heavy
machine gun duels with the Houthis in civilian neighborhoods there.
"Coalition forces supplied the resistance with a quantity of
high-quality weapons which landed in the south of the city in an
area under our control," a senior militia leader told Reuters.
The United Nations and aid groups have expressed alarm at a
worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which even before the war
struggled with widespread poverty and hunger. They say civilian
targets, including markets, factories, houses, schools and
hospitals, have been bombed.
MSF expressed outrage at the missile attack on its medical facility
in Yemen's far northern province of Saada, and Human Rights Watch
said the coalition appeared not to be investigating alleged rights
violations.
"Human Rights Watch has not been able to ascertain that Saudi Arabia
or other coalition members are investigating a single air strike,"
the group said in a statement on Wednesday.
"In some instances the coalition has denied that the attacks Human
Rights Watch documented were unlawful, but has not provided
information to support those claims," it said.
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"MY HEART BLEEDS"
"The world is rightly concerned about the toll, especially to
civilians, from this war," Yemen's Riyadh-based vice president,
Khaled Bahah, wrote in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal..
"Any civilian death is a tragedy for which my heart bleeds, and the
forces allied with us are taking extraordinary care to avoid
civilian casualties and target only military objectives."
Air strikes also hit military bases and Houthi combat positions in
Taiz, Sanaa and the Western Red Sea port of Hodaida, residents said.
Many of the raids targeting facilities that have already been hit
dozens of times throughout the mostly inconclusive seven-month war.
"The conflict is totally deadlocked," Yemeni analyst Farea
al-Muslimi said. "There's no political solution around the corner
and both sides are settling scores with each other with impunity as
civilians are stuck in the middle."
(Reporting By Mohammed Ghobari and Noah Browning, editing by Larry
King)
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