A Saudi airstrike targeted a school bus carrying children to summer camp on Dhahian’s outskirts in Yemen’s northwestern province of Saada.
SAADA PROVINCE, YEMEN — The late morning sun conspired with a cloudless blue sky to picturesquely frame the city of Dhahian in southern Saada province. Suddenly the serenity was broken by the loud piercing shriek of fighter jets over the quiet village, followed by a deafening explosion. When the thick black smoke finally began to dissipate, more than 20 mothers discovered a school bus carrying their children had been transformed into a hellish scene: choking dust, smoldering shops, and the charred corpses of children buried under the mangled school bus. Anguished moans and screams of grief and pain filled the air.
At a bed in the Jomhouri Hospital in Saada, four-year-old Mohammed was receiving first aid when he came to the realization that he was still alive but that more than 35 of his classmates, older and younger, lay dead in beds near him as if they were asleep. Others were lying in torn, blood-stained clothing along with school bags, fighting death in the same room.
Mohammed was one of the 80 civilians wounded on Thursday in fresh U.S.-Saudi strikes that targeted a school bus carrying children to summer camp on Dhahian’s outskirts in Yemen’s northwestern province of Saada.
It was 8:30 a.m. when the explosion shattered the day. “What did these children do to deserve this?” a 32-year-old witness to the strike asked. Abdul-Ghani Nayeb, the head of the Health Department in Saada told MintPress more than 50 were killed and over 80 others were wounded as a result of the strike. Some were shoppers and passers-by, but most were children.
The owner of a nearby restaurant, Zaid Hussein Deib, cried out, “they were not Iranian experts,” as he scrambled past overturned plastic white tables and splintered blue tiles. “They were children; they were not carrying ballistic missiles.” Deib lost two sons in the attack.
Read the rest of the report here
Top Photo | This image made from video taken on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018, shows a child injured in a Saudi airstrike on a school bus resting at a hospital in Saada, Yemen. AP Video via AP
Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.
Republish our stories!
MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
International License. 
With neither its farmers nor fishermen safe from Saudi coalition attacks, famine has become a massive crisis in Yemen, further exacerbated by the coalition’s blockade of the country which largely prevents food from being imported into the troubled nation.
Exposing the groups behind CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Israel lobby groups trying to get him fired from Temple University.
Why there’s nothing to celebrate in Bernie Sanders “Yemen Bill” aimed at ending the US involvement in Yemen. Here’s the loophole that allows for continued US involvement in Yemen.
Mnar Muhawesh discusses social media giants’ efforts to wipe independent journalism off the map and what can be done to combat this deliberate form of censorship.
