A stampede killed at least 85 people and injured hundreds during a charity drive in Yemen on Thursday, a new tragedy that has hit the poor country as it hopes to turn the page of a devastating war.
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The disaster struck overnight in Sana’a, Yemen’s rebel-held capital, where hundreds of people had gathered at a school in the old city to receive 5,000 riyals worth of relief supplies, about $8, which were carried by distributed to a seller.
“Three traders were arrested,” a security official in Sana’a said without further details.
Footage released by Al Masirah TV, the Houthi rebel television station, shows a dense crowd and people scrambling on top of each other to clear a path.
Some struggle as guards in military uniform try to push them in the opposite direction.
In another video we see corpses on the ground, in general panic.
Some witnesses claim gunfire caused the crowd to move, which AFP has not been able to independently confirm.
“At least 85 people were killed and more than 322 injured,” a Houthi security official in Sana’a told AFP. This report was confirmed by an official from the local medical authorities.
“Among those who died are children” and about fifty injured are in serious condition, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity and was not authorized to speak to the media.
This tragedy has plunged Yemen into mourning days before the Muslim festival of Eid el-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, as the country hoped to finally emerge from the war.
The Houthis, who are close to Iran, took the capital in 2014 and prompted the intervention of a Saudi-led military coalition in support of government forces a few months later.
The war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and plunged this country, the poorest in the Arabian Peninsula, into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Efforts to end the conflict have intensified in recent weeks with a visit by a Saudi delegation to Sana’a and an exchange of nearly 900 prisoners between the two hostile camps.
“overcrowding”
Sana’a authorities attributed the disaster to “overcrowding” in the narrow street leading to the school.
“As the doors opened, the crowd rushed up the stairs leading to the schoolyard where the distribution was scheduled,” Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the rebels’ Supreme Political Council, wrote on Twitter.
The rebels released a video in which a child lying on a hospital bed says he was injured when a “huge crowd” collapsed on him.
According to another witness interviewed by the Houthis, citizens “were informed almost a week ago that money would be distributed without strings attached. People then flocked in great numbers.
This stampede is among the deadliest mass movements in the world for a decade, according to an AFP count.
About 30 million Yemenis are exhausted from more than eight years of war.
In the face of epidemics, lack of drinking water and famine, more than three quarters of the population depend on international aid, but this is still declining.
In rebel-held areas, including the capital, many civil servants have not been paid for months.
The country has seen its share of tragedies in recent years, including in 2016 when a coalition raid killed 140 people at a funeral.
Another robbery on a school bus in 2018 killed dozens of children.
In January 2022, 70 people were killed in an airstrike on a prison in Saada in the north, and 45 migrants died in a fire at a rebel-controlled center in March of the same year.