Senators challenge Hegseth on civilian deaths in Yemen strikes

Washington Post

24-04-2025

Three Senate Democrats called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday to account for the scores of civilians reportedly killed in recent U.S. military strikes meant to target Houthi militants in Yemen.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) warned Hegseth that President Donald Trump's repeated claim that he would be a 'peacemaker' in his second term 'rings hollow.'
Such a 'serious disregard' for life calls into question the Trump administration's ability to conduct military operations 'in accordance with U.S. best practices for civilian harm mitigation and international law,' the senators told Hegseth in a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since early 2024, the United States has been engaged in what the military has described as a predominantly defensive campaign against Yemen's Houthis, an Iran-back group that control much of western Yemen. In response to Israel's war in Gaza, Yemen militants launched a sustained assault months earlier on U.S. and foreign ships traversing the narrow Red Sea shipping lane off their coast, imperiling global commerce.
Monitoring groups say the Trump administration has shifted the approach, moving from mainly striking Houthi military infrastructure to targeting its leaders. According to Airwars, a U.K.-based watchdog organization, U.S. strikes were estimated to have killed 27 to 55 Yemeni civilians in March. The estimated casualty toll in April to date is believed to be much higher.
So far the Trump administration appears to be 'choosing targets that pose a more direct risk to civilians and may indicate a higher tolerance to the risk of civilian harm,' Airwars said this month.
The United Nations assessed that casualties, a term that encompasses both those killed or injured in a military operation, tripled from February to March to a total of 162, the senators wrote in their letter. 'In addition, the strikes have moved beyond targeting Houthi missile launch sites to hitting urban areas,' including civilian infrastructure, they added.
A U.S. strike last week on a fuel depot in the Yemeni port of Ras Isa — which U.S. Central Command described as 'not intended to harm the people of Yemen' — killed more than 70 people, according to Houthi leaders and local news reports. The Post could not independently verify those figures.
The senators have implored Hegseth to account for the number of Yemeni civilians killed so far and asked him to describe the efforts that the Defense Department has undertaken to avoid such casualties. They also asked whether the Pentagon is even tracking reported civilian deaths after the Trump administration's recent steps to curtail civilian protection activities set up at the Pentagon under President Joe Biden.
Hegseth, a combat veteran and a former Fox News personality, has voiced disdain for restrictions imposed on U.S. forces' ability to operate and said he supports 'rules of war for winners.'
'Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys,' he wrote in his 2024 book, 'The War on Warriors,' lamenting that suspected fighters captured by U.S. forces benefited from access to attorneys.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Hegseth was asked whether the U.S. military under his leadership would abide by the Geneva Conventions and prohibitions on torture. 'What we are not going to do,' Hegseth responded, is put international conventions above Americans.
'I am extremely concerned that this administration is eliminating the safeguards we use to prevent civilian casualties, and that we use to ensure accountability with international humanitarian law,' Van Hollen, the lead author of the letter, said in an interview Thursday.
Such conduct runs counter to American values, he added, but it also threatens American security interests. 'As military leaders have made clear: if you don't minimize the loss of civilian life, not only are you potentially violating international humanitarian law, but you're undermining the goals of your mission.' In Yemen, 'you only fuel more anger at America among the population when you kill scores of civilians … [and] you risk the Houthis gaining more recruits to their cause.'
The administration's efforts to dismantle civilian harm mechanisms will 'undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm — work that actually began under the first Trump administration,' said Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director at Center for Civilians in Conflict, noting that many of those efforts arose from bipartisan legislation passed by Congress.
Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries, has long commanded outsize global attention as a hotbed for al-Qaeda militants and other extremist activity. And successive U.S. administrations — particularly that of former president Barack Obama — have drawn international outrage for civilian casualties that have resulted from U.S. drone strikes or other assaults on suspected militants.
Lawmakers from both parties grew increasingly outraged during the nearly decade-long bombardment of the Houthis by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who carried out the campaign using U.S.-supplied weapons. The carnage fueled a humanitarian crisis which, together with the bombardment, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, according to the United Nations and humanitarian groups.
The Trump administration's intensified offensive in Yemen appears to have rankled some influential voices within the GOP, who have warned of endless wars and depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles at a moment when many national security experts say the United States should be prepared for a potential conflict with China.
'Why did we have to do this? Is it part of our constitution that we must be bombing someone at all times?' far-right commentator and Trump ally Ann Coulter wrote on social media last month.
Trump's vice president, JD Vance, argued against the strikes in a private exchange with Hegseth and several other senior administration officials that was inadvertently shared with the Atlantic magazine's top editor last month.
'I think we are making a mistake,' Vance wrote.