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AFP / REUTERS
ADEN / DUBAI
TEN civilians were killed in bombardment of a crowded market and homes in western Yemen, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and local sources said on Wednesday.
A shell struck a market in Taez, a city just inland from the Red Sea port of Mokha and under siege by Yemen's H0uthi rebels, MSF said on Twitter. The medical charity did not specify when the attack took place nor who was responsible.
Another seven civilians, including two women and a child, were killed on Wednesday in Duraihimi to the north by rounds of mortar fire also blamed on Huthi fighters, local sources said.
They said the bodies were pulled out from the rubble of two destroyed homes, as medics at nearby Khokha hospital confirmed the casualties.
Allied with Iran, the northern Houthis are locked in a war against the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, who is backed by a powerful military alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in the Yemen conflict since 2015, when Saudi Arabia and its allies joined the government's fight against the Houthis. More than 2,200 of them were children.
The conflict has pushed the impoverished country to the brink of famine, triggering what the United Nations says is the world's worst single humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, the Iranian-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen said it had attacked a Saudi Aramco refinery in Riyadh on Wednesday using a drone, but the oil company said a limited fire at the plant was due to"an operational incident".
"Our drone air forces have targeted the refinery of ARAMCO company in Riyadh," read a tweet on the account of the Houthi-run television channel al-Masirah.
"The operation by the drone air force is a strong start in a new stage of deterring the aggression," it quoted a Houthi military spokesman as saying in a tweet. Saudi officials were not immediately available for comment.
Just before al-Masirah's tweet, Aramco announced that its fire control teams and the Saudi civil defences had contained a minor fire that erupted in the early evening in a storage containers at its refinery in Riyadh.
It tweeted that the fire had not affected the activities of the refinery and there were no casualties. It later added on its official twitter account that the fire was due to"an operational incident".
The Houthis, who control Yemen's capital Sanaa, have fired dozens of missiles into Saudi Arabia in recent months.
