Yemen air strike kills 12, including six children

An air strike on Yemen's capital Sanaa on Friday killed 12 people, including six children, rescuers said.

The attack comes days after air strikes blamed on the Saudi-led coalition fighting a Houthi insurgency hit a hotel outside the capital killing some 60 people.

Friday's attack on the Faj Attan area on the outskirts of the city also severely damaged at least two buildings, reducing much of them to rubble, people on site said.

Residents and rescuers dug through debris to retrieve the bloodied, dust-covered bodies of several children, who appeared aged under 10-years-old.

Mohammed Ahmad, who lived in one of the buildings, said he was among those who had taken nine bodies to a hospital.

"We extracted them one by one from under the rubble," he said. "Some of them were children from a single family."

Witnesses said they believed the warplanes were from the Saudi-led coalition waging a campaign against the Iran-aligned Houthi movement for control of the country in a war which has killed about 10,000 people in the past two-and-a-half years.

"When the rocket hit, one of the buildings was immediately destroyed which caused the building next door to collapse too. Some residents got out, but others were trapped."       

Some of them died and others were wounded, he said.

The Houthis and their ally, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, control much of the north of the country, including Sanaa. 

Yemen's internationally-recognised government is backed by a Saudi-led military alliance and is based in the south.

UN demands independent inquiry hotel strike

The United Nations human rights body called on Friday for an independent investigation into the air strikes on the Sanaa hotel earlier this week that killed dozens.

"We remind all parties to the conflict, including the Coalition, of their duty to ensure full respect for international humanitarian law," UN human rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell said. "It is not clear at this point what investigations there have been and what they have led to."

In the week to Thursday August 24, 58 civilians were killed in Yemen, "including 42 by the Saudi-led coalition," with the rest attributed to unknown armed men and to the Popular Committees affiliated with the Houthis, she said.