More than 100 killed after Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen

More than 100 people are believed to have been killed in an air strike by the Saudi-led military coalition on a detention centre in Yemen, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday.

The coalition said it targeted a facility run by the Huthi rebels that "stores drones and missiles", but the rebels said the attack had levelled a building they used as a prison.

The ICRC rushed to the scene in the city of Dhamar with medical teams and hundreds of body bags.

"The location that was hit has been visited by ICRC before," Franz Rauchenstein, its head of delegation for Yemen, told AFP from Dhamar. "It's a college building that has been empty and has been used as a detention facility for a while."

"What is most disturbing is that (the attack was) on a prison. To hit such a building is shocking and saddening - prisoners are protected by international law."

Rauchenstein said that over 100 people were estimated to be dead, and that at least 40 survivors were being treated for their injuries in hospitals in the city, south of the capital Sanaa.

ICRC teams collecting bodies were also "working relentlessly to find survivors under the rubble", he said, but cautioned that the chances of finding any were very slim.

Footage obtained by AFP showed heavy damage to the building and several bodies lying in the rubble, as bulldozers worked to clear away huge piles of debris.

The coalition intervened in 2015 to support the government after the Iran-aligned Huthis swept out of their northern stronghold to seize Sanaa and much of Yemen - the Arab world's poorest nation.

Fighting since then has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and sparked what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Both sides stand accused of actions that could amount to war crimes.