Yemen’s National Human Rights Authority has condemned the new Saudi forces’ crime by carrying out heavy artillery shelling against civilians’ homes and farms in the border district of Shada, killing and wounding civilians and destroying property.
The authority said the barbaric attack was part of systematic and ongoing crimes committed by the Saudi regime against residents of border areas in a flagrant and blatant violation of international and humanitarian laws and norms.
It added that the purported de-escalation or truce in place since April 2022 had been nothing more than a false cover for slow killings. The authority said Saudi forces had replaced warplanes with artillery and substituted large-scale bombardment with systematic sniper fire and “direct targeting of civilians” along the border.
The authority stressed that a genuine truce should not be measured by signed documents but by the blood of innocent people that the Saudi regime was obligated to protect rather than continue shedding every day.
It added that deliberately shelling a civilian residential and agricultural district with artillery constitutes a deliberate attack on civilians and their property, which is prohibited under international humanitarian law and amounts to a war crime and a crime against humanity.
The authority further said that the continuation of this approach for more than four years since the purported “truce” amounts to a policy of collective punishment and forced displacement of residents along the border strip. It also described the attacks as a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Yemen and the sanctity of its territory.
The National Human Rights Authority held the Saudi regime fully legally and morally responsible for the latest attack, as well as for all previous crimes in the border districts of Shada, Razih, Baqim, Munabbih, and elsewhere.
It called on the international community and the United Nations to end the shameful silence and complicity and to dispatch independent international investigative committees to document the alleged crimes.
The authority also called on human rights organizations to break through a media blackout and expose the crimes it said were being committed “in the shadows.”
It affirmed the Yemeni people’s legitimate right to defend their land and sovereignty and to deter the aggressor by all lawful means.
The authority ended its statement by saying that the blood of the people of Shada and other areas was not cheap and that the alleged crimes of aggression would not be subject to a statute of limitations. It said those who believed the “false truce” would erase the history of the aggression were mistaken, adding: “History records, peoples do not forget, and justice is inevitably coming.”
Source: Al-Manar Website