Alwaght- The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed on Tuesday 40 children, many under the age of 10, were among 51 people massacred in a Saudi airstrike on a school bus in northwestern Yemen.
In a new toll, the ICRC said that 56 children were also among the 79 people wounded in Thursday’s strike on Saada Province, the single biggest attack on children in the three-year-old Saudi-led aggression.
The children were returning from a trip organized by a religious seminary when the bus came under attack. Images later circulated online, showing pieces of a US-made Raytheon Mark 82 general-purpose free-fall bomb on the scene.
Over the past days, Yemeni cities have been the scene of protests against the new Saudi crime.
Thousands of mourners attended a funeral procession for many of the dead children in Sa’ada’s provincial capital of the same name on Monday, venting their anger against Riyadh and Washington.
The crowd held pictures of the children and chanted slogans against Saudi Arabia and its ally and key arms supplier, the United States.
The Supreme Revolutionary Committee of Yemen has held the US -- the main weapons supplier to the Riyadh regime -- responsible for the carnage.
The UNICEF, the United Nation’s children fund, called the carnage the single biggest attack.
How many more children will suffer or die before those who can act, do by putting a stop to this scourge?
I’m horrified by the airstrike on innocent children, some with UNICEF backpacks, on a bus in Sa'ada,
The Saudi-led coalition however described the attack as “legitimate,” with coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki even claiming that the strikes “conformed to international and humanitarian laws.”
Geert Cappelaere, the regional director in the Middle East and North Africa at UNICEF, has said there is “no excuse” for the continued complacency towards the war on Yemen.
The United Nations Security Council has called for a “credible and transparent” investigation into the airstrike.
The Al Saud regime along with some of its allies, particularly the UAE, has been waging a deadly war against impoverished Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the popular Ansarullah movement.
