Residents and medics said air strikes by helicopters flying from Saudi Arabia killed 30 civilians in a Yemeni village on Sunday, but Saudi authorities dismissed the accounts as "totally false."
Apache helicopters fired rockets at the village of Bani Zela in Hajjah province, 6 miles from the Saudi border, killing at least 25 civilians, including women and children, the residents and medics said.
The helicopters returned for a second strike as residents and medical teams were trying to evacuate casualties, killing three medics and two more civilians, they said.
"People were fleeing their homes as the helicopters pursued," a resident who identified himself as Khaled, said by telephone. "
They committed a massacre for no reason."
Yemen's Saba news agency, run by the Houthi rebels who are now in control of much of the country and under attack by a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states, put the death toll at 28 and said 17 others were injured, some seriously.
"Rescue teams and medics are still working on transferring the casualties to safety," the agency said, quoting an official in the province.
A Saudi official said
the coalition had played no role in any attack in the area. "This is totally false news. We deny it," said the official, who declined to be identified, adding that no coalition helicopters operated so far from the border.
The coalition has been
pounding the Iran-allied Houthi group from the air for six months, trying to eject it from the capital Sanaa and restore President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.
The campaign has resulted in several mass killings of civilians, including 36 people at a water bottling plant in August and 25 workers at a milk factory in April.The target of Sunday's strikes was unclear, but the border area has recently been the scene of clashes between Yemen's Houthis and Saudi forces. Last week, the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya channel reported that 40 Houthis were killed during an attack on al-Hathera village in Saudi Arabia's Jizan province.
Sunday's attack came less than a day after Saudi Arabia announced that a brigadier general died in hospital of wounds suffered in an incident on the border with Yemen.
Ibrahim Omar Ibrahim Hamzi, deputy commander of the 8th brigade in Saudi Arabia's southern Jizan province, was injured "defending the nation and its citizens," the statement said, without providing details.
His death follows the killing of two border officers along the frontier on Saturday.
About 100 Saudi military personnel, including another general, have been killed along the border with Yemen since the Saudi-led campaign began in March, according to a Reuters count.
More than 4,500 Yemenis
have died since March, according to U.N. figures.
In the latest fighting, coalition airstrikes pounded suspected Houthi targets in the capital around 25 times, residents said, and hit several other central provinces.
Hadi arrived in the southern port city of Aden on Tuesday, a week after his government's formal return to Yemen from Saudi Arabia after nearly six months in exile.
But he left the country again on Sunday, local officials said, en route to the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. It remains unclear whether he will return again to Yemen or go back to Saudi Arabia.
Yemen was socialist after the British pulled out but tagged as communist by the western powers, Saudi Arabia included. After much internal strife which was stirred up by Saudi agents afraid of a united Yemen rich in resources there were civil wars which weakened the country and its ability to fend off the ‘western’ influence. Western sponsored ‘puppet’ governments existed on and off since the 1960’s amid the Yemenis attempts at restoring their own leadership which have been labelled as coups by the west. It gets complicated by the many biased sources of history and politics surrounding Yemen so I will quote from wiki:
In south Yemen, home to the much of the country’s oil reserves and wealth, personal properties and real estate were “illegally appropriated by the rulers of North Yemen. Privately owned land was seized and distributed amongst individuals affiliated with the Sana'a government. Several hundred thousand military and civil employees from the south were forced into early retirement, and compensated with pensions below the sustenance level. Although such living standards and poverty was ripe throughout all parts of Yemen, many residents of the south felt that they were being intentionally targeted and dismissed from important posts, and being replaced with northern officials affiliated with the new government of Hadi.
In May 2007, southern strife took a new turn. Grieving pensioners who had not been paid for years began to organise small demonstrations calling for equal rights and an end to the economic and political marginalization of the south. As the popularity of such protests grew and more people began to attend, the demands of the protests also developed. Eventually, calls were being made for the full secession of the south and the re-establishment of South Yemen as an independent state. The government's response to these protests was dismissive, labelling them as ‘apostates of the state’.
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Unhappy with being treated like third class citizens and being left to starve the original people of Yemen (the Houthis) decided to rise up against the puppet government of Hadi and they were doing well until Saudi Arabia had to take in Hadi after he was chased out. A united Yemen is bad news for Saudi and the west so the military campaign you are reading about today was started by the west to recover control of the resources.