KABUL: (MEP) At least five people have lost their lives and many others were wounded after fresh Saudi airstrikes bombed a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) health center also knowns as ‘Doctors Without Borders’ in Yemen.
The organization “strongly denounced the attack,” in the Razeh district of Sa’ada Province on Sunday, Yemeni media report said.
“We strongly condemn this incident that confirms a worrying pattern of attacks to essential medical services and express our strongest outrage as this will leave a very fragile population without healthcare for weeks,” Raquel Ayora, MSF director of operations, said on Sunday.
She noted that the organization constantly shares the coordinates of its facilities with those warring sides fighting in the impoverished Arab nation.
“We haven’t received … any feedback [so far] from any of our contacts in the different lines of command, so we cannot confirm if any investigation has been launched,” the MSF official told RT.
“All the warring parties, including the Saudi-led coalition, are regularly informed of the GPS coordinates of the medical sites where MSF works and we are in constant dialogue with them to ensure that they understand the severity of the humanitarian consequences of the conflict and the need to respect the provision of medical services,” said Raquel Ayora, MSF’s Director of Operations.
This is not the first time that Saudi fighter jets target an MSF-run hospital in Yemen.
In October 2015, MSF said a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a Yemeni hospital with patients and staff inside.
“We don’t know if it was a targeted situation or a mistake. Hospitals in the area provide essential services to [a] population that is suffering enormously from the consequences of this conflict… We are in contact with all the [fighting] parties and it’s really difficult to explain how it [attacks on hospitals] can happen. It’s [become] a trend, it’s happening more and more in the last few months, and delivering essential medical assistance in Yemen and some other countries is becoming almost impossible,” Ayora told RT.
Laurent Sury, MSF’s emergency coordinator said the medical facility was targeted six times by airstrikes, even though coalition forces had coordinates of the hospital.
The hospital was completely destroyed, and several people were injured.
