Children among nine dead in air raid

Children were among at least nine people killed in an air strike Friday in a residential neighbourhood of Yemen's capital Sanaa, witnesses and medics said.

The attack destroyed two buildings in the southern district of Faj Attan, leaving people buried under debris, they said.

Medics and a rebel security source confirmed at least nine people had died in the strike.

An AFP photographer on the scene said the two buildings, both three storeys high, were totally destroyed.

Mohammed Ahmad, who lived in one of the buildings, said he was among those who had taken nine bodies to a hospital.

"We extracted them one by one from under the rubble," he said. "Some of them were children from a single family."

"When the rocket hit, one of the buildings was immediately destroyed which caused the building next door to collapse too. Some residents got out, but others were trapped."

Some of them died and others were wounded, he told AFP.

The Al-Massira television channel run by the Huthi rebels who control the capital said the air strike had killed 14 civilians including six children, blaming a Saudi-led coalition for the strike.

The coalition entered Yemen's war in 2015 in support of the government against the Iran-backed rebels, who are in a fragile alliance allied with troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The World Health Organization estimates nearly 8,400 civilians have been killed and 47,800 wounded since the Saudi-led alliance intervened.

The country also faces a deadly cholera outbreak that has claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected more than half a million people since late April.

The combination of war, disease and blockades imposed on ports and Yemen's airspace have pushed the country, long the poorest in the Arab world, to the brink of famine.