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civilian casualties
With Airport Attack, Israel Is the Latest Country to Endanger Yemeni Lives
The Israeli doctrine of total war, in which civilian harm is completely disregarded, is now being applied to Yemen.
Dec 27, 2024
The Israeli Air Force on Thursday extended its total war on its neighbors to Yemen for a fourth time. The Air Force has gained the technical capability of refueling fighter jets in midair, for which the Israelis and other U.S. allies in the region used to have to depend on the United States. This capability allows them now to fly down the Red Sea to Yemen and bomb it. The attack comes in response to repeated launching of missiles at Israel by the Houthi government of northern Yemen in sympathy with the people of Gaza.
The Israelis bombed the airport in the capital, Sanaa, the port of Hodeida, and oil refineries. Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni reports that according to local sources, the Israeli fighter jets primarily targeted Sanaa International Airport and al-Dailami Air Base, with eight raids having been carried out almost at once.
The Houthis have not been flying jets against Israel, so attacking the airport just harms the civilian Yemeni economy.
The Israelis destroyed the control tower at the airport and appear to have damaged the tarmac, putting it out of operation.
Since the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) was in Sanaa and was at the airport, the attack endangered his life.
Local sources said that Israeli fighter jets conducted three similar raids on Hodeida and oil facilities around the port.
The Israelis have a legitimate casus belli or legal basis for war, given that the Houthis have been firing missiles at Israel, endangering schoolchildren and other civilians. Likewise, the Houthis have disrupted Red Sea commerce by attacking random cargo ships, which further violates the laws of war.
However, the Houthis have not been flying jets against Israel, so attacking the airport just harms the civilian Yemeni economy. Likewise, the Hodeida port is the main conduit for food and other necessities to reach the north for civilian purposes. Attacking oil facilities means lack of gasoline for civilian families to drive into the market and get food. Yemen is a country with a profound health crisis after a decade of war, with millions suffering food insecurity and the danger of disease outbreaks rampant. It has the highest burden of cholera globally.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was at the airport when it was struck, and whose close call exemplifies the Israeli practice of disregarding civilian life, described the scene:
Our mission to negotiate the release of U.N. staff detainees and to assess the health and humanitarian situation in Yemen concluded today. We continue to call for the detainees’ immediate release.
As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, about two hours ago, the airport came under aerial bombardment. One of our plane’s crew members was injured. At least two people were reported killed at the airport. The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge—just a few meters from where we were—and the runway were damaged.
We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave.
My U.N. and WHO colleagues and I are safe.
Our heartfelt condolences to the families whose loved ones lost their lives in the attack.
U.N. spokesperson Stéphanie Tremblay reported that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that airstrikes on Red Sea ports and Sana’a airport pose grave risks to humanitarian operations at a time when millions of people are in need of life-saving assistance.”
The Israeli doctrine of total war, in other words, in which civilian harm is completely disregarded, is now being applied to Yemen. The Israelis are not the first. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates heavily bombed Yemen from 2015-2022, inflicting substantial damage on civilian infrastructure and killing many civilians, in a failed attempt to dislodge the Houthis from power. On the whole, bombing guerrilla groups is ineffectual unless combined with a land campaign.
Even The New York Times has finally caught up to Israeli reporters at +972 Mag, who reported last spring that Israeli commanders were allowing up to 100 dead civilians for each senior militant killed, and up to 20 civilians dead for each lower-level fighter. These barbaric rules of engagement have led NATO to cease military cooperation with Israel, since their ROE violates the norms of the armies of civilized countries.
The Houthis grabbed power in 2014-2015, overthrowing the recognized Yemeni government. They are a militant movement that sprang from the Zaydi denomination of Shiite Islam. The Zaydis differ from the Shiites of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon in not having ayatollahs and in having relatively good relations with Sunnis historically. Although Zaydis make up only 25% of the Yemeni population of 34 million, they comprise half of the population of northern Yemen where the Houthis rule. Some Sunni tribes have allied with the Houthis, so the latter they rule 70% to 80% of the population.
Of the already perilous condition of the civilian population, UNHCR writes,
The ongoing conflict and related breakdown of basic infrastructure and services, as well as limited availability of humanitarian assistance, has left many displaced individuals and households living in substandard conditions. Inadequate water and sanitation facilities contribute to frequent outbreaks of cholera, with resulting malnutrition. Compounding the severity of these needs, Yemen’s economy is in crisis, with over 80% of the population now living below the poverty line. Of the 96,907 IDP and host community households (588,835 individuals) assessed to date in 2024, almost 50% reported earning 25,000 Yemeni Rial (50 USD) or less per month, with 35% reporting no income at all. This forces some families to rely on harmful coping mechanisms, such as skipping meals, taking children out of school to work, begging, and exposing women and children to other forms of exploitation and abuse, including early marriage.
Yemen is enormous, bigger than California, but its south and east are thinly populated, and those are the areas the Houthis do not control—some 60% of the land area.
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IDF Gaza Bombing 'By Far the Most Intense, Destructive, and Fatal' Airwars Has Analyzed
"Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less than other comparable conflicts," said one advocate.
Dec 13, 2024
The world's foremost monitor of civilian harm caused by aerial bombardment published a report Thursday calling the first 25 days of Israel's ongoing U.S.-backed annihilation of Gaza the worst assault on noncombatants it has ever seen.
U.K.-based Airwars—which over its decadelong existence has meticulously and painstakingly documented civilian casualties in various campaigns of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror, Russia's bombing of Ukraine and Syria, Turkish attacks on Syria and Iraq, and other conflicts—published a "patterns of harm analysis" examining the first few weeks of Israel's retaliatory assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
"By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign," Airwars said in a summary of the report. "It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented."
Key findings include:
- At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023, nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014;
- In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident, nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe;
- Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza, nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars;
- Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes, with more than 9 out of 10 women and children killed in residential buildings; and
- On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed—higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars.
"The international community has raised grave concern about Israeli military practice and the unprecedented scale of civilian harm," the report notes. "The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Israel is breaching international law and even United States President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, eventually labeled the military response 'over the top.' In January 2024, South Africa brought a claim of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice."
As of Friday, Gaza officials say that at least 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,464 have been wounded in Gaza. At least 11,000 others are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.
Throughout the new report, Airwars compares Israel's bombardment of Gaza to two other campaigns it has extensively analyzed, the battles for Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria during the U.S.-led coalition war against the so-called Islamic State. Airwars concluded that more Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces during the first 25 days of the Gaza campaign than were slain in Raqqa during the entire four-month period studied and the deadliest month in Mosul—combined.
The report also pushes back on claims that Israel "does everything possible to avoid harming civilians," and that "the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favorable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades."
Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less that other comparable conflicts… gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org
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— Huwaida Arraf (@huwaida.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 9:27 AM
"The manner in which Israel has conducted the war in Gaza may signal the development of a concerning new norm: a way of conducting air campaigns with a greater frequency of strikes, a greater intensity of damage, and a higher threshold of acceptance for civilian harm than ever seen before," the authors wrote.
Airwars leaves readers with the ominous prospect that, while it is "expecting the overall trends to remain, magnitudes of difference—where measures of civilian harm in Gaza outpace those from previously documented conflicts—are expected to grow."
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Trump Condemned for 'Genocidal' Threat to Destroy Iran
"Trump's threat to blow Iran's largest cities and the country itself 'to smithereens' is an outrageous threat that should be widely condemned," said the National Iranian American Council.
Sep 25, 2024
Former U.S. President Donald Trump's threat on Wednesday to blow Iran "to smithereens" if he returns to power was condemned by a leading Iranian American advocacy group as "genocidal."
Trump—the 2024 Republican nominee—addressed a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday after he was reportedly briefed about alleged Iranian assassination threats against him.
"If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country—in this case, Iran—that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens," he said to raucous applause. "We're gonna blow it to smithereens, you can't do that. And there would be no more threats."
Responding to the former president's remarks, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said in a statement that "Trump's threat to blow Iran's largest cities and the country itself 'to smithereens' is an outrageous threat that should be widely condemned as psychotic and genocidal."
"Just like his threat to target 52 of Iran's most cherished cultural sites, Trump appears disturbingly willing to kill millions of Iranians who have no say over the actions of their authoritarian government," NIAC continued. "These remarks should be disqualifying for a man vying to once again be commander in chief and have sole authority over launching nuclear weapons with the power to make good on his horrifying threat."
"Likewise, we unequivocally condemn any Iranian threats that may be targeted at Trump or former officials," the group added. "Political violence must be rejected and prevented in all forms. Assassinations are a path to war and human suffering, as was demonstrated by the strike on [Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Maj. Gen.] Qasem Soleimani that engendered these threats, and risk further embroiling the region in violence."
Trump ordered the January 2020 airstrike that killed Soleimani in Iraq. He also unilaterally withdrew from the so-called Iran nuclear deal and ramped up sanctions on Tehran, exacerbating Iran's economic woes.
While Trump is known for his boastful and sometimes empty claims, as president he also followed through on his 2016 campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State fighters and "take out their families," resulting in thousands of civilian casualties in countries including Iraq and Syria.
Although Trump often presents himself as the peace candidate, critics have warned voters not to be fooled.
"He's a liar. C'mon, you know he doesn't tell the truth at all," Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—the only member of either legislative chamber who voted against authorizing the so-called War on Terror in 2001—said in a recent interview with The Nation.
"Just look at his record, who he cozies up to in terms of dictators," Lee added. "He wants more investment in the military budget. What his strategy is, is to create a more dangerous world."
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