CAIRO –
A landmine has killed a 13-year-old boy in the Yemeni city of Hodeida, health and security officials said on Friday, the latest in a series of similar incidents in the war-torn country. break.
The explosion came a day after three children and a woman were seriously injured in a landmine blast, according to an aid group.
Friday’s explosion occurred on a city street and also seriously injured a teenager, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Thursday’s explosion occurred when a child began playing with a landmine. Doctors Without Borders said the explosion injured the child and three others nearby. It said four casualties went to a hospital in the besieged city of Taiz and were transferred to other medical facilities.
Mines have been laid in Yemen since the 1960s. However, since the outbreak of war in 2014, both sides have planted more. According to Yemeni Landmine Records, a group that records landmine casualties, 32 people in Yemen were killed by mines and other unexploded ordnance last month.
Yemen’s brutal civil war began after Iran-backed Houthi rebels swept down from the northern mountains and seized the capital Sanaa, along with much of the north of the country, toppling the internationally recognized government. receive. Saudi Arabia entered the war in 2015 on the side of the Yemeni government-in-exile.
The Houthis have made extensive use of landmines. The US-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project says Houthi mines killed at least 122 people between 2016 and 2018.
“Due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate estimates, these numbers likely account for a small fraction of all landmine blasts involving civilians in Yemen,” ACLED said in a 2018 report.
A wave of Saudi-led air strikes is also accused of killing thousands of civilians, hitting markets, hospitals and weddings during the eight-year conflict.
Now in its ninth year, the conflict has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and has killed more than 150,000 people, according to the database project.
