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The boy’s family watched as he lay bleeding and alone in a field, the sharp crack of bullets piercing the air.
“The sniper kept shooting,” Mohamed Abyad, the boy’s uncle, also named Mohamed, told NBC News.
“He did not allow them to approach him for five minutes,” the farmer said by phone of the incident that saw the family caught up in the fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the country’s devastating civil war. . .
When the shooting finally stopped, Abyad said that Mohamed’s brothers rushed him to a nearby field hospital, but that it was too late; died on the way.
Mohamed was only 10 years old when a suspected Houthi sniper killed him.
That was in October, the deadliest month for Yemeni children and their families so far this year, according to Save the Children. At two hotspots of clashes in the war-torn country, child casualties increased 55 percent compared to the monthly average this year, according to the Loneon-based humanitarian group.
The rise was reported ahead of this weekend’s virtual G-20 leaders’ summit hosted by neighboring Saudi Arabia, which entered the Yemen war on the side of the internationally recognized government in 2015 after Houthi rebels seized the control of the capital, Sanaa, a few months earlier.
The Houthis are now the de facto authority in northern Yemen, and Riyadh has long feared that they could establish an Iranian presence along the Saudi border.
Abyad said it was a Houthi sniper who killed Mohamed. But NBC News couldn’t verify this or other details of his story. Yemen is extremely difficult to operate as a journalist and NBC News conducted the interview over the phone.
Abyad said that for the past 20 months snipers had been stationed in the mountains around his family’s home, which is situated in a valley in Dali province. Opposite sides are less than a mile away from her village, which is caught between the two, she said.
Villagers, who move on donkeys and on foot, have always been attacked, but lately a sniper has developed greater precision, he said. In the space of a year, three people were killed and another child was shot and injured just five months ago, he said.
“They don’t distinguish between young or old, male or female,” he said. “They just shoot.”
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has come under fire for chairing the Group of 20 countries this year despite the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, his crackdown on human rights activists and his war in Yemen. The civil war, now entering its seventh year, has killed more than 112,000 people and triggered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
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Human rights groups have called on leaders to boycott the meetings, and the mayors of New York City and London, for example, refused to participate in a G20-related meeting on urban development, citing the record of human rights of the kingdom, according to The Associated Press. .
Xavier Joubert, National Director of Save the Children in Yemen, did not ask the leaders to boycott the procedures, but said they should ask the parties to the Yemen conflict to return to the negotiating table and that the G-20 members “Immediately stop selling” weapons to the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“These arms sales fuel this devastating war that continues to kill and maim children across Yemen,” he said in a statement earlier this week.
Last month, there were 228 civilian casualties nationwide, the highest monthly count in just over a year, according to the group. Children are among the worst affected, he added, accounting for a quarter of the conflict-related casualties recorded this year.
Houthi rebels have also been accused of recruiting child soldiers to fight on the front lines of the conflict.
Meanwhile, the number of child casualties caused by airstrikes has increased fivefold since June compared to the previous three months, according to Save The Children. And as the Yemen war continues, the possibility of respite for Yemeni children feels remote.
The humanitarian crisis remains the worst in the world, with 2 million children suffering from acute malnutrition and more than 368,000 children under the age of 5 in urgent need of life-saving food, according to the UN children’s agency.
An estimated 80 percent of the population is dependent on aid, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and millions are forced to choose between food and medicine.
Human Rights Watch has said that G-20 countries should advocate that Saudi Arabia, among other measures, allow a UN human rights monitoring group access to the kingdom, including the headquarters of the Saudi-led coalition. Saudi in Riyadh and the Ministry of Defense.
“The G-20 countries can make a difference and play an important role in convincing Saudi Arabia to stop its human rights abuses,” said Michael Page, deputy director for the Middle East of the New York-based human rights group. , in a statement earlier this month.
Charlene Gubash reported from Cairo. Saphora Smith of London.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
