Children were among at least 14 people killed in an air strike that toppled residential blocks in Yemen's capital Sanaa on Friday, witnesses and medics said.
The attack was the latest in a wave of deadly raids on residential areas of Yemen blamed on a Saudi-led Arab military coalition, drawing strong international condemnation. The United Nations has accused the Arab coalition of killing 42 civilians in the week to Thursday, including many children.
Friday's air raid destroyed two buildings in the southern district of Faj Attan, leaving people buried under debris, said an AFP photographer on the scene. The images he took showed severely damaged buildings, piles of smashed concrete blocks and splintered beams of wood. Medics at the site said at least 14 people including six children and two women had died in the strike at 3:15 am (0015 GMT). Al-Massira television channel run by the Shiite Huthi rebels who control the capital said those killed were all civilians, and blamed the Saudi-led coalition for the strike.
Mohammed Ahmad, who lived in one of the buildings, said he was among those who had taken nine bodies to a hospital. "We extracted them one by one from under the rubble," he said. "Some of them were children from a single family." "When the rocket hit, one of the buildings was immediately destroyed which caused the building next door to collapse too. Some residents got out, but others were trapped." Some of them died and others were wounded, he told AFP.
Diggers were still working at the site hours after the raid as medics and residents searched for the missing. Survivors sat on the rubble and helped move the wounded to ambulances. A man wearing a bloodied white gown walked among the torn and burnt pieces of clothing and bits of wooden furnishings.
The coalition entered Yemen's war in 2015 in support of the government against the Iran-backed rebels, who seized Sanaa the previous year after forming a fragile alliance with troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The World Health Organization estimates nearly 8,400 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led alliance intervened.
Friday's raid came two days after at least 35 people died in a series of strikes on Sanaa and a nearby hotel that rebels have also blamed on the coalition.
Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki told AFP that those killed in Wednesday's air strike were "armed militants", adding that the strike was aimed at "a high-value target". On Friday's strike, he said: "I will review the information."
Human rights groups have repeatedly criticised the coalition, which controls Yemen's airspace, over the civilian death toll from the bombing campaign.
Northern and southern Yemen have both come under aerial attack in recent months, and the coalition has come under massive pressure from international organisations including the United Nations over the raids. The United Nations has said the coalition was likely responsible for a July attack on the southwestern Taez province that killed 20 people, including children.
"In the week from August 17 to August 24, 58 civilians have been killed, including 42 by the Saudi-led coalition," UN human rights office spokeswoman Liz Throssell told reporters in Geneva on Friday.
"In all these cases, in which civilians were killed and injured, witnesses said that there had been no warnings that an attack was imminent," her agency said.
Yemen also faces a deadly cholera outbreak that has claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected more than half a million people since late April.
A combination of war, disease and a coalition blockade have pushed Yemen, long the poorest in the Arab world, to the brink of famine. The United States also regularly conducts deadly drone strikes on Yemen that Washington says target Al-Qaeda.The Saudi-led Arab military coalition on Saturday admitted responsibility for an air strike the previous day in the Yemeni capital that killed 14 civilians, describing it as a "technical mistake".
The coalition, in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, said a review of the strike investigators found "that a technical mistake was behind the accident".
Witnesses and medics in Sanaa said several children were among 14 people killed in Friday´s air strike that toppled residential blocks in Sanaa, the latest in a wave of deadly raids blamed on the Saudi-led coalition.
Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki had told AFP that he would "review the information" about the strike.
On Saturday, he said in the statement that the coalition "regrets the collateral damage caused by this involuntary accident and offers its condolences to the families and relatives of the victims".
Friday´s raid targeted Faj Attan, a residential neighbourhood in the south of the capital that has been controlled since 2014 by Huthi rebels.
The coalition on Saturday accused the rebels of "setting up a command and communications centre in the middle of this residential area to use civilians as human shields".
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Friday condemned the raid as "outrageous".
Rights group Amnesty International´s Middle East research director, Lynn Maalouf, said the coalition "rained down bombs on civilians while they slept".
She called in a statement for the UN to take action against Saudi Arabia over the list of civilian facilities struck in deadly air raids over the past two years.
The coalition entered Yemen´s war in 2015 in support of the government against the Iran-backed rebels, who seized Sanaa the previous year after forming a fragile alliance with troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 8,400 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led alliance intervened in the Yemen conflict.
