A ramped-up US bombing campaign on Yemen has killed civilians and brought further destruction and uncertainty to the poorest country in the Middle East, compounding an already dire situation after Donald Trump cut aid, according to local people, humanitarian workers and rights groups.
“Now the rampant bombing has started, you never know which way things will go,” said Siddiq Khan, who works as a country director in Yemen for the aid charity Islamic Relief.
For more than two weeks, US airstrikes have hit the Gulf country, targeting the anti-western Houthi movement, which controls most of the war-torn country. “Hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before,” the US president said after launching initial strikes, the first such use of US military might in the region since he retook power in January.
The bombings aim to punish the Houthis for their attacks on commercial cargo traffic in Red Sea shipping lines, which the militants say are a response to Israel’s killings in Gaza.
Details about Trump’s military campaign were exposed in public last week when a journalist was accidentally added to a private group chat with senior US officials in which they boasted about the initial operations.
The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wrote in the Signal app group that the Houthis’ “top missile guy” had been killed after walking into his “girlfriend’s building”. He provided no information on whether the woman was also killed, or any mention of efforts to mitigate civilian harm. JD Vance, the vice-president, responded by saying “excellent”, and Waltz replied later with emojis of a clenched fist, a US flag and a blazing flame.
Strikes have targeted Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, as well as the port city of Hodeidah and the Houthi stronghold of Sa’ada. The targets include densely populated areas, but assessing the impact on civilians of the strikes – which are coordinated with and supported by UK armed forces – is difficult.
Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the Houthis had blocked off “any and all access” to bomb sites and hospitals as part of a crackdown on civil society and the media. But she added: “There is no question there are civilian casualties. Residential areas are being hit in the middle of the night, which is a sure-fire way to kill civilians.”
The Houthi-run Saba news agency has said the US has twice bombed a cancer hospital in the country’s north and accused the US of “full-fledged war crimes by targeting civilians and civilian objects, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries in several governorates”. Independent groups have also suggested a high degree of civilian harm.
In a post on X, the Yemen Data Project, which monitors attacks in the country, said that the first week of attacks had killed at least 25 civilians, including four children. About half of the strikes had hit civilian sites, including a school, a wedding hall, residential areas and Bedouin tents, it said.
The group added: “The very first US strike in Yemen under the new Trump administration, carried out on the evening of 15 March (and the subject of that Signal group chat), hit al-Jaraf in the north of the capital, killing at least 13 civilians and injuring nine.”
Another monitoring group, Airwars, which tracks and analyses open-source information, has documented women and children being killed and injured. The UN says it has verified that at least two boys, aged six and eight, were killed in strikes in northern Sa’ada, with a third missing.
Photos of the aftermath show destroyed residential buildings, with water tanks and shredded clothes within the rubble. A US defence official said “battle damage assessments” were being conducted and “do not indicate civilian casualties”. They added: “We likely won’t have any updates until after the conclusion of operations.”
A decade of violence has shattered Yemen’s already weak economy and left millions of people unable to find decent livelihoods to support their families. As a result, out of a population of roughly 36 million, about 19 million people require aid – 15 million of whom are women and children. Half of all children under five in Yemen are malnourished, according to Unicef. An aid plan for 2025 is only 6.5% funded so far.
Khan, from Islamic Relief, said the recent bombings were adding pressure on to an aid sector that was already collapsing under other Trump measures. Two of the biggest factors have been the huge cuts to USAid and the designation of the Houthis as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, which puts aid groups working in the vast Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen at legal risk in the US.
Humanitarian organisations are now scrambling to work out how to operate in the country without being in breach of US law and with much less funding, all in addition to an intense bombing campaign.
“Overall, there has been a gradual but then sharp kind of decline in humanitarian aid to Yemen,” he said. “Obviously, many organisations are kind of downsizing and some have closed as well.
“The bombings have further scared the organisations here about whether this will be the right place to stay and work. So overall, there’s a huge vacuum … taking over the humanitarian sector here,” he added. “I see a real catastrophe coming Yemen’s way.”
Another aid worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said their staff were “dealing with really, so many things at the same time, which is compounding our ability to access people right now”.
The Houthis, which are backed by Iran, have already restricted access and detained aid workers over the past year, creating a climate of fear among the aid community.
“So all of this really impacts the way our staff feel comfortable and safe to provide services to the communities,” said the aid worker. “Yet at the same time, they are very determined to provide as many services as possible to the communities.”
Washington is one of several belligerent actors in Yemen, which has suffered a decade of civil war, with several states, including neighbouring Saudi Arabia, conducting bombing campaigns.
The effectiveness of strikes on the Houthis, without troops on the ground, has been repeatedly questioned as the group has already managed to survive years of attacks.
