Jemens Houthi rebels say 68 deaths in the US air attack in prison | Yemen

According to Jemens Houthi rebels, 68 people were killed and 47 injured in a US strike in a detention center that African migrants kept in the city of Saada.

The rebel group, which rules the northwest of Yemen, said that the shelter is under the supervision of the International Organization for Migration and the Red Cross and that it “represents a full -fledged war crime”. The US military had no immediate comment.

Since March 15, the United States has almost daily strikes against the group supported by Iraner in an operation called “Rough Rider” to end the threat to ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The Houthis aimed in October 2023 on Israeli and western ships in the Red Sea, in what they call solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The youngest Houthi attack on Saturday was aimed at Israel's Nevatim Airbase with a Palestinian hyperschall-ballistic rocket. The rocket was shot down by the Israeli defense.

Graphical film material, which was broadcast by the al-Masirah satellite news broadcaster of the Houthis after the strike on Sunday evening, showed what seemed to be in the internment camp as corpses and others.

Yemen has long been an important transit country for people from Africa -mainly from Ethiopia and Somalia -to achieve Saudi Arabia and Oman. An estimate claims that there are more than 300,000 migrants in Yemen, a country that is destroyed by a 10-year civil war on the ground. The Houthis allegedly earn tens of thousands of dollars a week to smuggle people across the border.

The alleged strike on Monday reminded of a similar attack by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which fought against the Houthis on the same site in 2022, which caused a collapse that killed 66 prisoners and 113 more wounded, according to a report by the United Nations. The Houthis shot 16 prisoners who fled after the strike and wounded another 50 wounded, said the UN. The coalition led by Saudi Arabia tried to justify the strike by saying that the Houthis had built drones there and launched, but the UN said it was a prison.

The US military has changed the tactics since the Trump government arrived, which the Houthis declared in January as a foreign terrorist organization. Since mid-March, the United States has taken a much more persistent bombing that not only aims at Houthi rocket sties, but also its political leadership, including Abdelmalek al-Houthi, the Houthi leader since 2004.

In an explanation on the early Monday, before the news broke about the latest strike, the US Central Command said: “In order to preserve operational security, we have deliberately restricted details of our ongoing or future operations. We are very deliberately in our operational approach, but will not give any details about what we have done or what we will do.”

In March, Donald Trump claimed that the Houthis-Die last militant group in the Iranian “axis of resistance”, which Israel can attack regularly, had been “decimated” by US strikes. But he also warned: “Stop shooting on US ships and we will stop shooting them. Otherwise we have just started and the true pain is still before, both for the Houthis and for their sponsors in Iran.”

The effectiveness of the US strikes is controversial, and the Houthis in the past have shown the ability to withstand a bombing by Saudi Arabian jets that are supplemented by British leadership.

Great Britain was also more involved in the latest US military operations than in any other European country. The majority of the US strikes started by the USS Harry's Truman in the Red Sea, but additional strikes were carried out by USAF B-2 bombers from Diego Garcia, the British basis in the Indian Ocean, which rented in the USA.

Since the decision in mid -March, more than 750 strikes have been approved to increase the bombing.

For its part, the Houthis claim to reduce seven US reaper drones in less than six weeks at a price of over 200 million US dollars for the Pentagon.

The value of the US attacks on the Houthi leadership is controversial, and some claim that the movement would not be disturbed if its guide was murdered. The Houthis are Zaydi Shia, a branch that believes that the leadership on descendants of the Prophet Mohammed should be limited and that the leaders must meet certain criteria, including the recognized religious scholars.

Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies, recently wrote in the review of Yemen: “Without a respected local Zaidi authority, which is able to convey or conduct the transition, the dispute would probably not be excited without conveying the role of grouping.