Airstrikes by Saudi-Led Coalition Kill Dozens in Western Yemen

SANA, Yemen — Dozens of people, including many prisoners, were killed after airstrikes by a Saudi-led military coalition struck a security facility in western Yemen, local security officials and news reports said on Sunday.

The airstrikes late Saturday evening hit a security complex, which included detention facilities, in the port city of Al Hudaydah on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. The area is controlled by Houthi rebels, who hold much of the country’s north and west.

A security official in Al Hudaydah said three strikes had targeted the compound after sunset on Saturday, destroying two detention centers that held men jailed by local security services, which the Houthis oversee. Forty-eight people were killed, most of them prisoners, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

Saba, a Houthi-controlled news agency, said the strikes had killed 60 people and wounded dozens of others. Al-Maseera, the Houthis’ satellite news channel, broadcast images of bodies covered in blankets and plastic sheeting.

Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition, confirmed in a statement that coalition jets had targeted a security building in Al Hudaydah, which he said the Houthis had used as “a command and control center for their military operations.”

General Asiri insisted that the attack had taken place at dawn on Sunday, even though Yemeni outlets reported it on Saturday night.

Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, has been embroiled in conflict since 2014, when the Houthis seized the capital, Sana, and other cities. They later sent the government into exile in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Since then, they have allied with parts of the Yemeni Army and are fighting forces across the country that are nominally loyal to the exiled president.

Last year, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Arab nations began bombing the Houthis to try to degrade their forces and restore President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, many of them civilians, and the United Nations has estimated that bombings by the Saudi-led coalition are responsible for most of the civilian deaths. Saudi Arabia has accused the Houthis of fighting from civilian areas, and human rights groups say the Houthis, too, have indiscriminately targeted residential neighborhoods.

Hours before the strikes in Al Hudaydah, at least 18 people, some of them children, were killed in coalition airstrikes in the western city of Taiz, The Associated Press reported.

International efforts to find a political solution to the war are at an impasse. A 72-hour cease-fire in October was not renewed by the warring parties, and on Saturday, Mr. Hadi rejected the latest peace plan proposed by the United Nations.

The plan, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, would gradually sideline Mr. Hadi while granting the Houthis a role in a future government in exchange for their withdrawal from major cities. In a statement from his office, Mr. Hadi said the proposal would legitimize the Houthis’ “coup” and called it “a gateway to more suffering and war.”