(by Rossella Benevenia) (ANSAmed) – ROME, JUNE 12 – The bombs and missiles of the Saudi-led Arab coalition on Friday killed civilians in Yemen and for the first time hit the historic Old City of the capital.

Three buildings of a World Heritage site were razed to the ground and a fourth collapsed. UNESCO condemned the act immediately.

”I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives as well as by the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape,” UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova said in a statement. Six people were killed, none of whom armed.

Giovanni Puglisi, head of the Italian national commission for UNESCO, noted that ”we are not facing the Islamic State (ISIS) bandits destroying cultural heritage. We are dealing with a Saudi-led coalition that, in reaction to terrorists’ acts of war and as part of a scorched earth policy, destroy the cultural heritage of the historic Yemeni city.” ”This is much more serious and worrisome than others due to its unusual nature,” he said. The Saudi missile came at dawn in the center of the Qasimi area with its thousands of inhabitants.

The area has homes over 2,500 years old, about a hundred Arabesque mosques and evocative hammams. ”It was a deafening sound, a horrible whistle,” said people on the scene. There was no blast, however, and the disaster could have been much worse. The missile did not explode, and thus brought down only the buildings it directly hit. The number of casualties is also very low: six dead (four women and two men buried under the rubble). On Thursday, a Saudi bomb hit a bus, burning over 20 people alive.

More here. H/T: Fjordman

NOTE II: The Saudis, once again, acting just like the Islamic State.