Saudi-led air strike killed at least 36 in Yemen

An air strike by warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition targeted a bomb-making factory, which killed 36 civilians working at a bottling plant in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah on Sunday according to residents.

Almost 4,500 people, including 1,950 civilians, have died since the coalition started its campaign in March and that there is now a humanitarian “catastrophe,” according to the UN.

“The corpses… many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant this morning,” one of the residents Issa Ahmed said from the site of Sunday’s strike in Hajjah.

However, Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, the Coalition spokesman denied the strike had hit a civilian target.

“We got very accurate information about this position and attacked it. It is not a bottling factory,” he said.

The coalition bombing campaign had left a “bloody trail of civilian death” which could amount to war crimes, human rights group Amnesty International said in a report.

Also on Sunday, a bomb explosion near the vacated U.S. Embassy in Sanaa killed 4 civilians, and unknown gunmen shot and killed a senior security official in the southern port city of Aden.