The New York-based rights group has issued a special report saying the regime in Riyadh has committed an "apparent war crime" by carrying out a fatal aerial attack on a residential area of Yemen last week.
The HRW has confirmed that the strikes of July 24 on residential compounds by Saudi warplanes in the Yemeni Red Sea port of Mokha killed at least 65 civilians, including 10 children. “On July 24, starting between 9:30 and 10 p.m., coalition airplanes repeatedly struck two residential compounds of the Mokha Steam Power Plant, which housed plant workers and their family members,” notes the HRW report.
Ole Solvang, the senior emergencies researcher with the HRW, said the Saudi regime committed a war crime by repeatedly striking two compounds housing the families of workers at the Mokha Steam Power Plant.
"With no evident military target, this attack appears to be a war crime," Solvang said.
HRW also believes Saudi Arabia’s failure to probe the legal basis of striking particular targets warrants the need for the United Nations Human Rights Council to get involved. This would be done by creating an investigative committee on war crimes violations.
Human Rights Watch visited the area of the attack a day-and-a-half later. Craters and building damage showed that six bombs had struck the plant’s main residential compound, which housed at least 200 families, according to the plant’s managers. One bomb had struck a separate compound for short-term workers about a kilometer north of the main compound, destroying the water tank for the compounds, and two bombs had struck the beach and an intersection nearby.
Bombs hit two apartment buildings directly, collapsing part of their roofs. Other bombs exploded between the buildings, including in the main courtyard, stripping the exterior walls off dozens of apartments, leaving only the load-bearing pillars standing.
Workers and residents at the compounds told Human Rights Watch that one or more aircraft dropped nine bombs in separate sorties in intervals of a few minutes. All of the bombs appeared intended for the compounds and not another objective.
Human Rights Watch says it saw no signs that either of the two residential compounds for the power plants were being used for military purposes. Over a dozen workers and residents said that there had been no Houthi or other military forces at the compounds. The power plant and the compound were built in 1986.
Early in the morning of July 25, a news ticker on Al-Arabiya TV, a Saudi-owned media outlet, reported that coalition forces had attacked a military air defense base in Mokha. Human Rights Watch identified a military facility about 800 meters southeast of the Mokha Steam Power Plant’s main compound, which plant workers said had been a military air defense base. The plant workers said that it had been empty for months, and Human Rights Watch saw no activity or personnel at the base from the outside, except for two guards.
The United Nations has lately declared its highest-level humanitarian emergency in Yemen as Saudi Arabia continues its deadly airstrikes against the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country.
Meanwhile the World Health Organization (WHO) says nearly 4,000 people have been killed in Yemen since Saudi Arabia launched its airstrikes against the country in late March.
On Tuesday, the WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said that 1,859 civilians had lost their lives among the total of 3,984 people who had been killed in Yemen until July 19.
The UN official also said that some 19,300 people, including 4,200 civilians, had been injured during the time period.
Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen since March 26 to return to power fugitive president Abed-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Local Yemeni sources say the brutal airstrikes have so far claimed the lives of almost 5,400 civilians, mostly women and children.
