Exposed: The Houthi charge sheet: killing civilians, recruiting child-soldiers

January 4, 2017

Cairo, Jan 4: A report alleging human rights violations in Yemen by Houthi rebels has recorded 949 cases of damaged public property and 2,673 instances of private property damage, the Saudi Embassy here reported on Tuesday.

Exposed

The damage varied between complete and partial by bombardment from Houthi militants and loyalists of deposed President Abdullah Saleh against civilian homes and government and private facilities, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the embassy.

The statement also said that Houthi rebels attacked and looted facilities. They also occupied some civilian buildings to be used as military barracks.

The report recorded 3,027 cases in which Houthi militias and Saleh loyalists allegedly undermined the powers of the state — which included financial, administrative imbalances, intervention in the tasks, issuance of appointments outside the framework of law, exclusion of some civil servants from their jobs and their positions, creating private prisons and checkpoints — and other acts of looting and tampering with public money during the first half of 2016.

The statement said the Houthis and Saleh militias are using heavy weapons against populated areas. As a result, more than 1,529 people were killed, including 102 women and 221 children in the governorate of Taiz.

Saudi Arabia and coalition forces are keen to use targeted, sophisticated and high-cost smart weapons to avoid civilian loss of life.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said on Sept. 7 during a speech at Chatham House Institute: “There is a lot of criticism to our (military) operations in Yemen, but the matter that is not understood by many people is that we run it with the utmost care and caution.”

He pointed out: “We have a highly professional air force and high-precision weapons. We try as much as possible to avoid causing any civilian casualties, and when accidents occur or questions arise, we do the necessary investigation and then work on changing the mechanisms we follow in order to avoid repetition. But the same criticisms do not address the Houthis and Saleh rebels who recruit children aged 9, 10, 11 and 12. They indiscriminately shell towns and villages, imposing blockades on them. They are starving people and stealing the humanitarian aid to use it as a bargaining tool in order to make political progress.”

He added: “We are working under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations Security Council Resolution (2216), which condemned the Houthis for their role in the seizure of the government and calls on them to withdraw from the territories they occupied and requires them to hand over their weapons. But they flagrantly violated all these demands, and yes I do not see any criticism to them.”

The embassy’s statement stressed that the achievements of “Restoring Hope” and “Decisive Storm” operations could not be ignored. The coalition has succeeded in liberating more than 80 percent of the land of Yemen and handed it over to the legitimate government.

The “Decisive Storm” managed to destroy the Houthi air force and more than 95 percent of ballistic missiles captured by the militias, in addition to destroying 98 percent of tanks and armored vehicles seized by them.

The Arab coalition has also secured the international shipping lines across Bab Al-Mandab Strait, which led to the elimination of alleged Iranian influence in Yemen and the end of the threat posed by the Houthi militias against the Kingdom.

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May 6,2024

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The Israeli regime is forcibly evacuating Palestinians from the eastern part of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip amid the prospect of its widely-discouraged ground invasion.

“The estimate is around 100,000 people,” an Israeli military spokesman told journalists on Monday when asked how many people were being evacuated.

International organizations, including the United Nations, have repeatedly warned the regime against invading the city, citing its hosting around 1.5 million Palestinian refugees.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said a ground assault on Rafah would “put the final nail in the coffin” for humanitarian aid operations in the Gaza Strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs also said, “Any ground operation would mean more suffering and death,” with an official saying “It could be a slaughter of civilians.”

Multiple aid agencies, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, have likewise warned against a Rafah offensive.

The NRC said such an invasion “would profoundly exacerbate the already catastrophic levels of need and the humanitarian emergency for millions of civilians with nowhere left to go.”

The official alleged Hamas had killed three Israeli forces on Sunday, attacking them from Rafah.

The evacuation order came a sat least 22 people lost their lives in the regime’s airstrikes killed in Rafah earlier on Monday.

Rafah’s evacuation “is part of our plans to dismantle Hamas,” the Israeli spokesman added, referring to the Palestinian resistance movement that has been defending Gaza in the face of the war.

The Palestinians have fled there from the ravages of a war that the regime began waging against Gaza on October 7, following a retaliatory operation by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

At least 34,683 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and 78,018 others injured so far during the brutal military onslaught.

On Friday, Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas’ Political Bureau, said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on carrying out a ground invasion of Rafah was a key stumbling block in negotiations aimed at a truce agreement.

The Israeli premier has said the regime would go ahead with invading the city “with or without” a truce.

Hamas has, however, asserted that the regime has failed to defeat the resistance during the war.

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News Network
April 23,2024

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The genocidal Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has entered its 200th day, with occupation forces killing more Palestinians in defiance of widespread international outcry to end the carnage.

The aggression marked its 200th day on Tuesday with no end in sight to the Israeli war that has so far killed a shocking number of Palestinians and led to a humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Israeli forces have committed three "massacres" over the past 24 hours, killing at least 32 Palestinians and wounding 59 others.

The numbers, it added, bring the Palestinian death toll to more than 34,183, with at least 77,143 injured and an estimated 7,000 missing and presumed dead since early October.

More than 14,500 children and 9,500 women are among those killed, making up over 70 percent of the victims, according to health officials.

Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Israel has been carrying out war crimes in Gaza by deliberately starving people and forcing their evacuation, as well as targeting hospitals and schools sheltering displaced Palestinians.

Despite all these atrocities, the regime has failed to achieve its declared objectives of “destroying Hamas” and finding Israeli captives held in Gaza.

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April 30,2024

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Gaza civil defense agency has warned of a looming health disaster in the besieged Strip as the decomposition of dead bodies under the rubble of buildings destroyed by the relentless Israeli bombings accelerates.

The agency pointed on Tuesday to the risk of diseases and epidemics associated with the public decomposition of thousands of bodies due to rising temperature.

“The continued accumulation of thousands of bodies under the rubble has begun to cause the spread of disease and epidemics, especially with the onset of summer and the rise in temperatures, which accelerates the process of decomposition,” it said in a statement.

Seven months into the war, the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned earlier that the decomposition of dead bodies for long periods leads to the transmission of serious diseases, including blood-borne viruses and tuberculosis.

"Gastrointestinal infections like cholera can also be easily spread through direct contact with dead bodies leaking excrement, soiled clothing, or contaminated tools or vehicles," it added.

In another report last week, Euro-Med Monitor also warned that thousands of corpses left in the streets or beneath house debris are rotting and being consumed by cats and dogs, which is an additional factor contributing to the spread of infectious diseases.

"The spread threatens the environment and public health in the Strip, and health authorities in the Strip have detected about one million cases of infectious diseases," the report added.

The Global Nutrition Group also estimates that at least 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s children under the age of five are affected by one or more infectious diseases and that 70 percent have had diarrhea in the past two weeks—a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.

Unexpected blistering temperatures across Gaza have also added to the daily misery faced by the enclave’s people and sparked new fears of disease outbreaks amid a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, also known as UNRWA said on Thursday.

This comes as the death toll from Israel's genocidal campaign against Gaza rose to 34,535. Among the dead are more than 14,500 children and 9,500 women.

Since the war began on October 7, nearly 85 percent of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced.

Vast swathes of the besieged territory are in ruins as Israel continues its onslaught, dropping at least 75,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, according to the Gaza Media Office.

Earlier this month, UNRWA, said 62 percent of all houses in the besieged territory have been damaged or destroyed.

Gaza Media Office recently reported that nearly 90,000 housing units have been destroyed while nearly 300,000 units have been damaged by the Israeli air and ground offensive.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Monday that nearly 37.5 million tons of conflict-generated debris are estimated to be present throughout Gaza, based on assessments by UN bodies.

The world’s hunger watchdog, known as the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said in a report published on March 18 that about 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza are living through catastrophic food insecurity, warning that famine is likely to strike by May in northern Gaza and can spread across the territory by July.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a report published in late March that there were clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.

These acts Albanese said were “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

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