"The Crown Prince stressed that the involvement of the Iranian regime in supplying its Houthi militias with missiles is considered a direct military aggression by the Iranian regime and may be considered an act of war against the Kingdom," the state-run Saudi Press Agency said in a statement Tuesday. The agency also noted that Boris Johnson "expressed his condemnation" of the missile attack and reaffirmed the U.K.'s commitment to Saudi Arabia.
Iran, for its part, denies playing any role in Saturday's attempted attack, which Human Rights Watch says "is most likely a war crime." The Houthi rebels — an Iran-backed Shiite militia that controls much of Yemen, including its capital, Sanaa — fired what has been reported to be a Burkan H2 missile at the airport, only to see Saudi missile defense forces intercept it in flight. Some fragments of the destroyed missile did rain down on King Khalid International Airport. "The Houthis' launching of an indiscriminate ballistic missile at a predominantly civilian airport is an apparent war crime," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Tuesday. "But this unlawful attack is no justification for Saudi Arabia to exacerbate Yemen's humanitarian catastrophe by further restricting aid and access to the country."
A Yemeni man stands at the site of an airstrike in the capital, Sanaa
Indeed, the closure of Yemen's ports of entry threatens to worsen a situation that United Nations officials have also described as "catastrophic." As of Saturday, the World Health Organization was reporting that more than 900,000 suspected cases of cholera have been reported since late April in Yemen, where years of war and privation have debilitated the infrastructure and medical system. The WHO says the outbreak of cholera, a disease that under most circumstances should be both preventable and treatable, has claimed the lives of at least 2,188 people in that period. "They're lacking in everything from beds to basic medicines. Doctors said they didn't even have enough antibiotics," NPR's Ruth Sherlock told Morning Edition on Tuesday.
Ruth, who just left Yemen this week, said it's not just cholera that threatens civilians in the war-ravaged country but random violence, as well. She said she met one 12-year-old boy at a hospital who "stood on a landmine just outside his home seven months ago. He lost much of his left leg and the toes on his right foot." And that's not to mention the food shortage that has ravaged Yemeni civilians, leaving 2 million children "acutely malnourished & at grave risk of dying," according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "It is the worst food crisis we are looking at today, seven million people are on the brink of famine, millions of people being kept alive by our humanitarian operations," spokesman Jens Laerke told reporters this week, as Deutsche Welle reports. "If these channels, these lifelines, are not kept open it is catastrophic for people who are already in what we have already called the world's worst humanitarian crisis," said Laerke.
{url=https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/07/562517457/under-saudi-blockade-yemen-torn-by-competing-powers-and-facing-catastrophe]MORE[/url]
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Originally Posted by waltky
