Two children among three killed in Saudi air strike, Houthi official says

Displaced Yemenis at Al-Firdaws camp in Ras Imran, just outside Aden (Abdulnasser Alseddik/AP)

A Houthi official has said Saudi warplanes struck Yemen, killing three people, including two children, while Human Rights Watch accused the Houthi rebels of possible war crimes with their attacks on commercial vessels.

The renewed fighting in Yemen is endangering civilians and threatening shipping through the Red Sea, a route that has become more important because of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz since the US launched its war against Iran.

The Associated Press could not independently verify the Houthi official’s claim. The official did not say what the Saudi warplanes had targeted.

Anees al Asbahi, a spokesperson for the Houthi-run Health Ministry, said in a post on X on Tuesday that Saudi airstrikes killed the three in Yemen’s Taiz province.

Mr Al-Asbahi said another two other people were injured in the strikes.

The escalation comes as the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have seized the strategic islands of Greater and Lesser Hanish in the southern Red Sea, bolstering their ability to control a key maritime shipping route.

Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas transits in peacetime — in the opening days of the war. The Saudis have since used the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which leads out of the Red Sea, for crude oil exports.

The Houthis’ latest seizures, which follow their capture of the Red Sea port of Mokha and a strategic island last week, put more pressure on Saudi shipments and, in turn, global oil supplies and prices.

This could give Iran additional leverage in its war with the United States.

Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that at least three attacks by Houthi rebels against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden between July 20 and August 24 could amount to war crimes.

The Houthi attacks against Saudi-linked shipping started in mid-July in the latest flare-up of violence in the Yemen civil war.

Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that irrespective of any politics involved, “attacks on civilian crews carried out deliberately or recklessly are war crimes”.

The Houthis say their attacks on Saudi-linked shipping are retaliation for the Saudi-led coalition blockade on the Houthi-held areas in Yemen, a measure related to Yemen’s decade-old civil war.

The human rights organisation said the Houthis claimed to have attacked at least nine vessels over the span of a month, including two Saudi-flagged vessels, a Tanzania-flagged vessel, and a Dominica-flagged vessel.

The rights group urged the Houthis to “immediately and unconditionally end all unlawful attacks on civilian ships”.

Elsewhere, China’s Foreign Ministry said Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi will visit the country on Wednesday and meet his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.