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civilian casualties
Yemen's Health Ministry Says Majority of 53 Killed in US Strikes 'Were Women and Children'
"All because Yemen refuses to let Israelis wipe Palestine out," said one critic.
Mar 17, 2025
The Yemeni Health Ministry said Sunday that most of the more than 50 people killed in U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were women and children as the war-torn Mideast nation braced for more "overwhelming lethal force" promised by President Donald Trump in retaliation for Houthi rebel attacks on American warships, international shipping, and Israel.
Anis al-Asbahi, a spokesperson for the Yemeni Health Ministry, said that the wave of dozens of U.S. strikes across eight provinces including the capital Sanaa killed 53 people, 31 of them civilians, and wounded more than 100 others.
"The majority of them were children and women," al-Asbhahi toldDrop Site News, adding that the death toll was likely to rise, as rescue workers were still finding victims amid the rubble.
Dozens of civilians, including children and women, were killed in U.S. bombings across Yemen as Trump vows to unleash “overwhelming lethal force” to stop the Houthi naval blockade targeting Israel’s war on Gaza. Read Shuaib Almosawa's report from Yemen: www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-mass...
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— Jeremy Scahill ( @jeremyscahill.com) March 17, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Yemeni journalist Shuaib Almosawa wrote for Drop Site News:
Scenes filmed inside Saada hospital revealed a chaotic environment, with medical staff rushing injured people, including children and women, on stretchers into hospitals and through corridors. Severely injured children were screaming, some with faces bloodied and burned. Others were covered with dust and blood, suggesting they had been pulled from the rubble. A few small victims were charred beyond recognition.
Nasser Mohammed Saad told Almosawa that he was at a friend's home in Sanaa on Saturday evening celebrating iftar when four U.S. airstrikes directly hit the house next door.
"The house that was hit belongs to a citizen who has nothing to do with anything," Saad said, calling the strikes "a savage and barbaric aggression targeting civilians."
"It only targeted the innocent, terrifying children, women, and the elderly," he added.
The weekend strikes sparked protests in Yemen on Monday, including a massive demonstration in Sanaa attended by at least hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom believe the bombings were carried out on behalf of U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some of the demonstrators held placards with slogans including "Death to America, Death to Israel!"
The Trump administration said the strikes were ordered after Houthi rebels—who are officially known as Ansar Allah and who control Sanaa and most of western Yemen—resumed attacking ships including U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Houthis began attacking commercial and military ships in the area in response to Israel's annihilation of Gaza.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social site Saturday that he "ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action" against the Houthis, who "have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones."
"Joe Biden's response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going," Trump continued, referring to the series of sustained strikes carried out by his Democratic predecessor along with Britain and Israel that reportedly killed at least dozens of Houthi fighters and at least one civilian. "It has been over a year since a U.S. flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden."
"The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated," the president said. "We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective."
Trump also had a message for Iran, which backs the Houthis: "Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won't be nice about it!"
In response to the U.S. strikes, the Houthis said they launched a barrage of drones and missiles at the USS Harry Truman, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Red Sea, and other ships in its carrier group. The U.S. military said that none of its warships were hit and that U.S. warplanes shot down all of the incoming drones.
"We affirm that this aggression will not deter the Yemeni people from continuing to support Palestine and fulfilling their religious and humanitarian duties in supporting the people of Gaza, their resistance, and their heroic fighters," Ansar Allah said in a statement.
U.S. forces have launched drone and other airstrikes against Yemen since the George W. Bush administration. There have also been occasional U.S. ground raids in the Middle Eastern country, including one in January 2017 that killed Nawar al-Awlaki, an 8-year-old American girl whose father and brother were killed in separate U.S. drone strikes during the administration of former President Barack Obama.
According to the U.K.-based monitor Airwars, U.S. forces have killed an estimated 175-300 Yemeni civilians in 181 declared actions since 2002. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing and blockade.
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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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