Airstrikes on a farming village east of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, killed at least 33 people — including 13 children — and wounded 39 more, Houthi health officials said on Sunday, in one of the deadliest reported attacks since fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis resumed in July.
The strikes hit homes in al-Shariya, a village in the Bani Hushaysh district about 15 kilometres (10 miles) east of Sanaa, on Saturday afternoon. The Houthi-run Saba news agency said about five residential houses were destroyed. Rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the rubble on Sunday, and officials warned the toll could still rise.
The death toll climbed through Saturday as the rescue went on. Health officials first reported 11 dead, then 22, then 25, before putting the count at 27 killed and 36 wounded. On Sunday morning, the health ministry’s spokesman, Anees al-Asbahi, announced the revised toll: 33 killed and 39 wounded. He said the dead included 12 men, eight women and 13 children, and the injured included 16 men, 10 women and 13 children.
The figures come from Houthi authorities, and they have not been independently confirmed. Reuters and The Associated Press both reported that they could not verify the account. The Houthis blame Saudi Arabia for the strikes. Saudi Arabia’s Center for International Communication said it was investigating the reports, and Riyadh has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.
Hours after the strikes, the Houthis’ military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, said the group had carried out six missile and drone operations against targets in Saudi Arabia — including Riyadh airport and facilities of the state oil company Aramco — in retaliation for what the Houthis called “deadly Saudi strikes on civilians” in Taiz and Bani Hushaysh. Those claims of retaliatory attacks have not been independently confirmed either.
The Sanaa-area strikes came a day after an attack on a crowded market in Yemen’s southwestern Taiz province killed at least 30 people. In that case, too, the two sides blamed each other: the Houthis said Saudi warplanes hit the market, while the internationally recognised government said a Houthi ballistic missile was responsible. Neither claim has been independently verified.
For readers outside the region, the background is this: the Houthis are an Iran-aligned movement that has controlled Sanaa and much of northern Yemen since 2014. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015 on the side of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. A United Nations-brokered truce in 2022 largely halted the fighting, but it broke down in July 2026, and the war has been escalating since. The United Nations says more than 1,600 people have been killed and more than 300,000 displaced since the fighting resumed; across the wider conflict, the UN estimates at least 150,000 people have been killed.
Why this matters: Two mass-casualty attacks in two days, followed by claimed strikes on Riyadh airport and Aramco, show that a war the world had largely stopped watching is sliding back toward the open, large-scale fighting of its worst years — and civilians are paying the highest price. The victims in al-Shariya were not soldiers or officials; most were women and children in their own homes. Each new round of strikes also raises the risk of a wider regional escalation: the Houthis have repeatedly targeted Saudi airports and oil infrastructure, and Saudi Arabia’s air defences have been stretched by the tempo of attacks. For a country already facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the return of this war means more deaths, more displacement, and less food and medicine reaching the people who need them most.
The Sanaa-area strikes came a day after an attack on a crowded market in Taiz province killed at least 30 people. The Houthis have also previously struck Riyadh airport, killing 12 people in October.
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