Dozens of Saudi-sponsored militiamen loyal to Yemen's former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi have lost their lives when Yemeni army soldiers and fighters from allied Popular Committees launched offensives against their positions in the country’s strategic western province of Hudaydah.

The media bureau of Yemen’s Operations Command Center announced in a statement on Thursday that Yemeni troops and their allies launched attacks against the gatherings of Saudi mercenaries in the Kilo 16 district of Hudaydah, killing more than 45 of them and injuring several others.

The statement added that eight Oshkosh Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and a number of military vehicles belonging to the Saudi-backed militiamen were destroyed in the assaults as well.

Separately, two children were killed when Saudi warplanes pounded a residential building in the Haydan district of Yemen’s mountainous northwestern province of Sa’ada.

A Yemeni child recites a prayer by the graves of schoolboys who were killed while on a bus that was hit by a Saudi airstrike on the Dhahyan market in August, at a cemetery in Yemen's northwestern province of Sa’ada on September 4, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that the air raid also caused immense material damage to the targeted area.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating military campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing the government of Hadi back to power and crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

Some 15,000 Yemenis have been killed and thousands more injured since the onset of the Saudi-led aggression.

More than 2,200 others have died of cholera, and the crisis has triggered what the United Nations has described as the world's worst humanitarian disaster.