Spain is due to sign a framework deal to sell Saudi Arabia warships worth around 1.8 billion euros ($2.2 billion) on Thursday, a Spanish Defence Ministry source said.
Under the agreement, Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia will sell five small warships, Spain’s army will train Saudi military personnel and contractors will build a naval construction center in the kingdom, the source said.
Campaign groups Amnesty International, Spain’s FundiPau, Greenpeace and Oxfam have called on Spain to stop selling military equipment to the Saudis, accusing the kingdom of abusing rights – charges it denies.
Prince Mohammed, who serves as defence minister and controls economic and energy policy, was welcomed by Spain’s King Felipe VI at the Zarzuela palace on the outskirts of Madrid.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of its regional allies — mainly the united Arab Emirates and Jordan — started a war against Yemen with the declared aim of crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement, who had taken over from the staunch Riyadh ally and fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, while also seeking to secure the Saudi border with its southern neighbor. Three years and over 600,000 dead and injured Yemeni people later, the war has yielded little to that effect.
Hodeidah and its environs are among the most severely harmed by the blockade and the threat of famine, the civilians living there are also at risk of being bombed for no reason. There is no excuse for bombing this house and killing these civilians. This attack is a gross violation of international law and a war crime, and the governments responsible for it should be held accountable. This is what the coalition does with the refueling and weapons that the U.S. provides them. Refueling coalition planes just makes it easier for them to carry out more outrageous attacks like this one. Secretary Mattis tried arguing the other day that refueling gives coalition pilots more time to make better decisions about where to drop their bombs, but that ignores the reality that coalition governments have routinely shown blatant disregard for civilian life throughout the war. This latest attack is just the latest example out of the thousands and thousands of strikes on civilian targets that the coalition has carried out.
“Hodeida should be supporting more than 20 million Yemenis. It should be the source of at least 70 percent of all imports to Yemen,” Suze van Meegen, a protection and advocacy adviser with the Norwegian Refugee Council, told AFP.
