70 killed in airstrike on Yemen prison

SAADA, Yemen: At least 70 people were killed or wounded in an air strike on a prison and at least three children died in a separate bombardment as Yemen's long-running conflict suffered a dramatic escalation of violence on Friday.

The Huthi rebels released gruesome video footage showing bodies in the rubble and mangled corpses from the prison attack, which levelled buildings at the jail in their northern heartland of Saada.

Further south in the port town of Hodeida, the children died when air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition hit a telecommunications facility as they played nearby, Save the Children said. Yemen also suffered a country-wide internet blackout. "The children were reportedly playing on a nearby football field when missiles struck," Save the Children said.

The attacks come after the Huthis took the seven-year war into a new phase by claiming a drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed three people on Monday. The United Arab Emirates, part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels, threatened reprisals.

Aid workers said hospitals were overwhelmed in Saada after the prison attack, with one receiving 70 dead and 138 wounded, according to Doctors Without Borders. Two other hospitals have received "many wounded" and as night fell, the rubble was still being searched, the aid agency said.

Ahmed Mahat, Doctors Without Borders' head of mission in Yemen, said: "There are many bodies still at the scene of the air strike, many missing people. It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence."

The UN Security Council, meeting Friday at the request of non-permanent member the United Arab Emirates, unanimously condemned what it called the Huthis' "heinous terrorist attacks in Abu Dhabi... as well as in other sites in Saudi Arabia".

Global internet watchdog NetBlocks reported a "nation-scale collapse of internet connectivity". AFP correspondents in Hodeida and Sanaa confirmed the outage. Save the Children said it would hamper its operating capacity.

Yemen's civil war began in 2014 when the Huthis descended from their base in Saada to overrun the capital Sanaa, prompting Saudi-led forces to intervene to prop up the government the following year. The UN has estimated the war killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease.