Médecins Sans Frontières condemns bombing at Shiara hospital, saying attackers would have known it was a health facility

At least four people have been killed and 10 injured after an MSF-supported hospital was hit by a rocket or bomb in northern Yemen, the medical aid group said.

Three of the injured were Médecins Sans Frontières staff, with two reported to be in critical condition. MSF said the “projectile” struck the Shiara hospital in the Razeh district of Saada province at 9.20am local time on Sunday, leading to “the collapse of several buildings of the medical facility”.

MSF could not confirm the origin of the attack, but said planes were seen flying over the hospital at the time. At least one other projectile fell near the hospital. All staff and patients have evacuated and patients are being transferred to Al Goumoury hospital in Saada, also supported by MSF.



Saada, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, has faced a particularly intense bombardment from the Saudi-led coalition supporting the Yemeni government.

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Raquel Ayora, MSF’s director of operations, said: “There is no way that anyone with the capacity to carry out an airstrike or launch a rocket would not have known that the Shiara hospital was a functioning health facility providing critical services and supported by MSF.”

This is the third time an MSF health facility has been hit in the last three months. On 27 October Haydan hospital in Saada was destroyed in an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition. On 3 December, a health centre in the city of Taiz was also hit by the coalition, wounding nine people.

Ayora 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.

“Once more, it is civilians that bear the brunt of this war,” she said.

In Afghanistan on 3 October, an MSF hospital in the city of Kunduz was bombed by US forces, killing at least 22 people.

About 5,600 people have been killed in Yemen’s civil war, according to the World Health Organisation. The Saudi-led coalition is fighting to drive the Houthisout of the capital, Sana’a, and other areas they captured last year, and to restore the internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.



The next round of peace talks between rebels scheduled for next week has been postponed. They were supposed to take place this week, but have been pushed back to 20 or 23 January and could take place in Geneva. The United Nations’ special envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, is travelling to Sana’a on Sunday to try to arrange new dates for the talks.

The Yemeni government and the rebels held six days of talks in Switzerland last month that ended with no breakthrough.

Yemen was the poorest country in the Arab world long before the removal of its veteran president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, after popular protests in 2011. Now it is experiencing what Oxfam calls the world’s largest “forgotten emergency”.