Mahda area, al-Safra district, Saada, August 4, 2017.
Casualties: At least 9 civilians killed, including 7 children, and 3 wounded.

At about 5 a.m. on August 4, coalition aircraft struck a house in al-Safra district, Saada, killing nine members of the same family, including six children, and wounding three, according to two witnesses, the director of a local hospital, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose staff members visited the village soon after the attack.

Abdulrahman al-Dhurafi, the 40-year-old general director of the Education Ministry’s office in Saada, told Human Rights Watch he had just finished his morning prayers when he heard “a loud blast that shook the house.” A few minutes later, a friend called to tell him his nephew’s home had been attacked.

Abdulla A’dayah, 33, who sells qat and lived near the home, said he was the first person to arrive after the attack: “Immediately… I heard the voice of Taha [al-Dhurafi’s nephew] calling for help from under the rubble.” A’dayah took the wounded man to the hospital after he and two other men had extricated him from the ruins of the house. “When I returned, I saw the [other men] took out others, but all of them were dead.”

Al-Dhurafi, who arrived soon afterward, said the house was “completely flattened:”

The first thing I saw when I arrived was a neighbor running out from… what remained from the destroyed house. … He was carrying a baby girl in his arms. I didn’t recognize who she was with the dust and the blood covering her face but she looked 2-years-old maybe. … Later I knew that this baby girl was Batool, who is two-and-a-half years old, Taha’s youngest child.

The two witnesses said that Taha al-Dhurafi, a 35-year-old farmer, lived in the house with his 27-year-old wife and their six children, ages 2 to 12, as well as his wife’s parents and their 17-year-old daughter. The attack killed his wife, all six of his children, his mother-in-law, and her daughter. Rescuers, after recovering the bodies of five children, searched “desperately” for hours for Fatima, his 3-year-old daughter, al-Dhurafi said. She was dead when they found her. He and his brother Ahmed, 28, were both burned and had fractured limbs.

Dr. Muhmmad Hajjar, the general director of Saada’s Jumhouri Hospital, said hospital ambulances went to the house immediately after the attack and that rescuers found six or seven bodies, “mostly very young children.” The hospital treated three men wounded in the attack, he said.The witnesses said they did not know of any military targets in the area, which included primarily family homes and agricultural land. A military camp for special forces was about a kilometer east, and a passport administration building – a civilian object – was about a kilometer south.In a Saudi Press Agency statement, Col. Turki al-Maliki, who replaced Brig. Gen. Ahmed Assiri as the coalition spokesman on July 27, denied reports the coalition targeted the house, saying the coalition had completed an after-action review for operations conducted that day in Saada. He said the coalition was continuing to investigate in coordination with the government of Yemen and other international partners “on this unfortunate incident,” noting Houthi-Saleh forces store “weapons and explosives inside houses and civilian objects.”