Dozens killed when Saudi-led airstrike hits school bus full of children in Yemen

Dozens are dead after a Saudi-led airstrike hit a school bus in Yemen on Thursday, and most of those killed are believed to be children.

The bus was struck while driving through Houthi rebel-held northern Syria on its way to a summer camp, The Telegraph reports. At least 43 people are confirmed dead and 61 injured, a Yemeni official told Reuters, many of them children under the age of 10, the head of Yemen's International Committee of the Red Cross estimated in a tweet.

Yemen is currently fighting the Houthi rebels who hold the area. Saudi Arabia and the United States have backed Yemen's government, while Iran backs the Houthis. A Saudi-led Arab coalition has intervened in Yemen since 2015. It recently captured Yemen's airport in a rebel-held area, and destroyed a water supply that surely exacerbated the area's cholera epidemic.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Thursday's strike was a "legitimate military action" that "conformed to international and humanitarian laws," the Saudi coalition said in a press release. It came in response to Wednesday's Houthi missile strike on a Saudi city, which killed three, per The Guardian. "Under international humanitarian law, civilians must be protected during conflict," the Red Cross in Yemen said in a tweet.