UAE-backed separatist fighters have seized a number of military camps in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, as fresh clashes with forces loyal to the country’s internationally recognised government caused multiple deaths and injuries.
The two sides are nominal allies in a Saudi-UAE-led military coalition battling the Houthi rebel movement after the latter took over the capital, Sanaa, and most major cities in 2014.
Syrian opposition forces have withdrawn from the strategic town of Khan Sheikhoun, deep in the last rebel-held province.
Government forces, backed by Russia, closed in on the town in recent weeks, five years after rebels took over.
Government and Russian airstrikes pounded the southern edge of a rebel stronghold in Syria’s northwest on Saturday, killing at least seven members of one family, activists and a war monitor reported.
The intense airstrikes were coupled with fierce ground clashes as the government, backed by Russia, pushed ahead with a months-old offensive seeking to chip away at territory on the periphery of the rebel enclave.
Israeli war jets struck early on Saturday facilities of militant groups in the Gaza Strip in response to earlier rockets attack from the coastal enclave into southern Israel, security sources and local media said.
The sources and the Gaza-based local media said that Israeli war jets struck a military facility that belongs to Islamic Hamas movement in eastern Gaza, and another one in central Gaza Strip.
At least 13 people, including civilians, were killed in the renewed clashes that began on Wednesday in the Yemeni interim capital Aden, medical sources and eyewitnesses said.
On Wednesday, violent clashes broke out in Aden between the presidential guards of the internationally-recognized government and the UAE-backed Security Belt forces. The clashes erupted after the call from the separatist Southern Transitional Council to its loyal forces to pound the Presidential compound and topple the government.