Death toll rises to 52 in Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen's Hodeidah

SANAA -- The death toll from Saudi-led coalition airstrikes on Yemen's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah on Thursday increased to 52, the city's Health Office said in a statement obtained by Xinhua.

"The death toll from the airstrikes that struck in front of the Public al-Thawra Hospital and on the popular fish market increased to 52, while 102 civilians were wounded," the statement said.

"The toll was not final as scores of injured were in critical conditions," it said, citing the office's director Abdulrahman al-Jarallah.

The airstrikes hit a fishing port and a popular fish market, about 5 meters away from the main gate of Public al-Thawra Hospital in the city, a hospital official earlier told Xinhua by phone.

The official put the death toll at 30, but adding that dozens of bodies and injured were still trapped at the scenes of the airstrikes because of continuing air and sea bombardments.

There were no comments yet from the Saudi-led coalition.

The attack was the latest in a series of recent airstrikes launched by the Saudi-led coalition on Hodeidah.

Last week, a Saudi-led coalition airstrike killed at least five people of a family in the country's northern province of Saada.

The impoverished Arab country has been locked in a civil war since the Houthi rebels overran much of Yemen militarily and seized all northern provinces in 2014, including the capital Sanaa.

Saudi Arabia leads an Arab military coalition that has intervened in the Yemen war since 2015 to support the government of exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

More than 10,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians, have been killed in the war, and about 3 million have been displaced.

On June 13, the coalition began a major offensive to retake Hodeidah city from the rebels. The war has since raging on the city.

On Tuesday, the Houthis offered a unilateral initiative to their foe Saudi-led coalition forces to halt war for two weeks in the Red Sea.

The rebels' initiative came a week after Saudi Arabia suspended its oil shipments through the Red Sea strait of Bab al-Mandeb after Houthi fighters attacked two Saudi oil tankers.