Saudi-led strike hits Yemen hospital

A hospital in central Yemen has been hit by a Saudi-led coalition air strike, the state news agency says, a day after aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) reported that a “projectile” had killed four people in one of its clinics.

Saba, the Yemeni news agency run by the dominant Houthi movement since it seized the capital Sanaa last year, said the clinic in the Swadi district of Bayda province was destroyed on Monday.

But an official in Yemen’s government, now based in the southern port of Aden after being driven out of the capital Sanaa by Houthi forces, said the hospital was only damaged and that several Houthi fighters using it as a base were killed.

A military coalition led by Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s war last March against the Iran-allied Houthis, a campaign Riyadh says is aimed at repelling what it sees as creeping Iranian influence in the Arabian Peninsula region.

Nearly 6000 people have been killed since the Saudi coalition entered the conflict, almost half of them civilians. The war has exacerbated hunger and disease in Yemen, the region’s poorest country.

On Sunday, MSF said a “projectile” hit a hospital supported by the global charity in Yemen’s far northern province of Saada, the third major attack on its medical centres during nine months of war.

MSF said it was not clear who was behind the attack.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack calling on Yemen’s warring parties to “immediately cease all hostilities” and resume UN-backed peace talks, which ended without result last month.