Deadly floods drown pending fears of coronavirus in Yemen’s Aden

Cars drive through a flooded road following heavy rainfall in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on May 26, 2019. (File/AFP)
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Updated 25 March 2020
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Deadly floods drown pending fears of coronavirus in Yemen’s Aden

  • Aden had encountered a power outage after the rainfall
  • Yemeni weather expert Nabil Aboud said Aden is expected to witness further, heavier, rainfall on Thursday coming from the Arabian Sea

DUBAI: Severe flooding caused by heavy rains in Yemen’s Aden killed two with predictions of continued rainfall on Thursday as the city begins testing for coronavirus infections.

Medical sources told local daily Aden Al-Ghad on Wednesday that a man and a woman were caught by the floods. They were pulled from the water and transported to hospital, but died before receiving treatment.

Aden had also encountered a power outage after the rainfall. Officials in the electricity corporation said the stations had stopped operating.

Meanwhile Yemeni weather expert Nabil Aboud said Aden is expected to witness further, heavier, rainfall on Thursday coming from the Arabian Sea.

Doctors warned the government to take quick action to resolve the issue of flooding as stagnant water could cause a large number of mosquitos that may carry infectious diseases.

Despite confirmation from local and international health officials that the war-torn country has not yet recorded a single case of the coronavirus, the UN official warned that the virus could overwhelm Yemen’s understaffed and poorly equipped health facilities.

Abd al-Nasser Abu Bakr, head of the department for combating infectious diseases at the WHO office in the Eastern Mediterranean, told CNN Arabic last week that he expected "an explosion in the number of coronavirus cases in Syria and Yemen."


Israel says forces open fire on West Bank stone-throwers, one dead

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Israel says forces open fire on West Bank stone-throwers, one dead

The Israeli military said its forces killed a Palestinian in the occupied West ​Bank in the early hours on Thursday as they opened fire on people who were throwing stones at soldiers. Two other people were hit on a main ‌road near the ‌village of Luban ‌al-Sharqiya ⁠in ​Nablus, ‌the military statement added. It described the people as militants and said the stone-throwing was part of an ambush.
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank said ⁠a 26-year-old man they named as ‌Khattab Al Sarhan was ‍killed and ‍another person wounded.
Israeli forces had ‍closed the main entrance to the village of Luban Al-Sharqiya, in Nablus, and blocked several secondary roads ​on Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA reported.
More ⁠than a thousand Palestinians were killed in the West Bank between October 2023 and October 2025, mostly in operations by security forces and some by settler violence, the UN has said.
Over the same period, 57 Israelis were killed ‌in Palestinian attacks.