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The U.N. is ready to place Saudi Arabia and its coalition allies attacking Yemen on the organization's blacklist for abusing and killing children after the coalition attacked a school, a hospital and family home within four days, killing more than 35 civilians, a report by Foreign Policy magazine said Wednesday.
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The threat is likely to come in the form of a letter from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office to the Saudi government as early as Thursday, the magazine was told by unnamed senior officials at the United Nations.
In June, Saudi Arabia reacted angrily to a decision to blacklist the coalition after a U.N. report found the alliance responsible for 60 percent of the 785 deaths of children in Yemen last year. Ban later took the coalition off the list after threats to cut off funding to U.N. aid programs.
“I … had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many U.N. programs,” he said in defence of his decision to take the kingdom off the list.
The news comes just a day after the coalition killed at least 17 civilians when warplanes attacked a family home at a village near the capital Sanaa.
Shayef Muhsin Asem, who lived in the house but was out at the time of the attack, told the New York Times that “after the house was bombed, family members rushed in to try to rescue survivors when a second airstrike hit.”
The Saudi-led coalition also attacked a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital in Yemen's northern Hajja province Monday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 13. The attack on the hospital came after Saudi planes attacked a school in Saada province Saturday, killing 10 children.
Saudi Arabia said the school it targeted was a “training camp” for child soldiers, suggesting it was not the coalition’s responsibility that children were killed.
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"When jets target training camps, they cannot distinguish between ages," coalition spokesperson General Ahmed Assiri told AFP Sunday. However, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF concluded in an investigation that most of those killed were six to eight years old.
Commenting on the recent Saudi killings in Yemen, Ban’s office issued a statement Wednesday saying he was “alarmed by the escalation of airstrikes and ground fighting in Yemen,” adding "civilians, including children, are paying the heaviest price in the ongoing conflict, as civilian infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals continued to be hit.”
The threat will likely escalate tense relations between leaders of the U.N. and Saudi royals, who see the decision to remove the coalition as “irreversible and unconditional,” according to the kingdom’s ambassador to the United Nations.
However, Foreign Policy reported that officials say the mood in the U.N. has shifted in the past week and Ban’s top advisors, including Leila Zerrougui, are now brandishing the threat to shame the coalition if they fail to rein in their bombs.
More than 6,500 people have been killed, over half of them civilians, since the Saudi-led coalition began its assault on Yemen in March 2015. The coalition of Arab states intervened in the country after Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa and ejected the former government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Mansour Hadi.
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