Nineteen people have been killed in drone airstrikes in Ethiopia’s Tigray region over the past two days, aid workers and hospital sources told AFP on Tuesday.
The first airstrike carried out by drones on Monday in the Ethiopian town of Mai Tsebri, in the south of the northern region of Tigray, killed seventeen civilians, humanitarian sources told AFP on Tuesday.
One of the aid workers said dozens of people were injured in the strike, which took place less than 72 hours after a similar bombardment that hit a camp for internally displaced people in northwest Tigray.
“The strike in Mai Tsebri took place yesterday [lundi] in the afternoon and killed 17 people working in a flour mill, ”the aid worker said on Tuesday, citing witnesses. “A witness told me that the drones arrived and hovered a little while before dropping their bombs,” he added, also reporting dozens of injured.
In another drone strike on Tuesday, two people were killed and dozens injured in Hiwane, south of Mekele, the capital of Tigray, said an official and a doctor at the city’s main hospital.
Dozens of people were killed and many more injured in a previous drone strike on Friday, which hit Dedebit, in northwest Tigray, a camp hosting people displaced by Ethiopia’s 14-month conflict. .
According to humanitarian sources interviewed by AFP on Tuesday, the attack in Dedebit killed 59 people, one of these sources also reporting 138 injured.
The various figures and statements are impossible to verify, due to the restricted access to Tigray. A spokeswoman for the Ethiopian government said on Tuesday that she did not have any information on these various strikes.
“Urgent humanitarian aid”
The Tigray region has been the scene for 14 months of an armed conflict between the federal government and the former local authorities, from the Front for the Liberation of the People of Tigray (FLPT), the party which effectively ruled Ethiopia for nearly 30 years, until the coming to power of the current Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed.
The conflict in Tigray has claimed thousands of lives, and the region, according to the UN according to a “de facto blockade” of humanitarian aid, lacks food and medicine.