Report: Houthi militias killed 11,000 civilians in Yemen in two years
The Yemeni National Committee for Human Rights said that the Houthi militia and the ousted Saleh forces committed "mass massacres" against unarmed civilians in several governorates by random shelling of residential areas and popular markets by artillery, mortars and Katyusha rockets
The Committee's report stressed that those crimes are considered a grave violation of international human rights law and they are against humanity and they were not subject to statute of limitations and that the perpetrators must be punished
In its report, the Committee cited 11 incidents in which al-Houthi militia and the ousted Saleh forces carried out mass massacres, including the targeting of displaced persons from Tawahi area, when the militia dropped mortar shells at a group of unarmed civilians fleeing Houthi's inferno in small boats
The Committee's teams monitored the killing of 10,811 civilians by Houthi fire and mortar shells , including 679 women, 1002 children and 9,160 men over the past two years, the majority of whom were killed was in 2015, stressing that Houthi and Saleh militias deliberately targeted civilians
The committee added that the rise in civilian deaths during 2015 was due to the invasion of the Houthi militias and the ousted Saleh forces the central and southern provinces, as the militia in that period bombed randomly populated areas, including schools and hospitals
The Committee stressed that the coalition did not target any civilians or launch strikes on populated residential areas, and despite its leadership has available and sufficient information about the presence of weapons and ammunition in residential areas, the coalition refrained from bombing those areas in order to preserve the lives of innocent people and adopted in its military operations on the use of guided bombs by 90%, to avoid any loss of civilian life
According to the committee's report, the coalition is keen to maintain the ethics of war, and not to violate human rights or international standards. According to this , it formed a joint team to assess accidents, consisting of 14 members with expertise and competence in military and legal aspects. The team includes members from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE to investigate the charges