The Department of War told lawmakers this week that American military operations killed 153 civilians and wounded another 243 in 2025 — and that every one of those casualties came from three airstrikes carried out during last spring's bombing campaign against Yemen's Houthi movement. The disclosure arrived in an unclassified assessment sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee, part of an annual reporting duty Congress wrote into law back in 2018 requiring the Pentagon to publish civilian harm figures from the year before.
Three strikes, one campaign
All three incidents happened during Operation Rough Rider, the roughly two-month air campaign President Trump ordered in March 2025 after Houthi forces began firing on commercial vessels moving through the Red Sea. Investigators concluded it was "more likely than not" that harm to civilians resulted from strikes on April 6, April 17 and April 28. A residential building in Sanaa was hit first, killing five and injuring 25. Eleven days later came the campaign's single deadliest attack: a strike on the Ras Isa fuel port that killed 80 people and injured 171 more. The third strike, near Saada, hit a migrant detention facility and — according to the report's own summary table — killed 68 and injured 47.
Investigators told Congress they built these assessments from satellite imagery, intelligence reporting and open-source material, not from interviews or visits to the strike sites, citing the risks of operating in an active conflict zone.
A number the Pentagon can't keep straight
The government's report contains its own internal contradiction: the summary table for the Saada strike lists 47 people injured and 68 killed, but the narrative paragraph describing that same strike a few lines later says the opposite — 47 killed, 68 injured. Only one version can be right, and the math settles it: add up the "killed" column across all three strikes using the table's numbers (5, 80, 68) and you get exactly 153 — the government's own headline figure. Use the narrative paragraph's version instead and the total comes up 21 short.
News organizations have split on which number to run. CBS News and The Epoch Times both went with 68 killed at Saada, matching the table. Reporting from The Hill used the 47-killed figure pulled from the report's own inconsistent prose, without noting that it clashes with the document's summary table and its stated yearly total.
What the tally leaves out
Nowhere in the count are the dozens of people killed in the administration's separate campaign of strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific. By CBS News's count, those strikes killed roughly 120 people in 2025 and another 95 in the first half of this year. The administration frames them as counter-narcotics operations against cartel targets; legal experts have countered that suspects in criminal activity don't automatically become lawful military targets, and that killing them without due process could amount to extrajudicial killing.
Independent monitors, and a number worth double-checking
Outside groups that track civilian harm put Yemen's toll well above the Pentagon's own figure. Airwars, a nonprofit casualty-tracking organization, documented at least 224 civilian deaths during Rough Rider's eight weeks — about 70 more than the government acknowledges for the entire year.
At Ras Isa, Airwars counted 84 deaths — four more than the Pentagon's assessment — and Human Rights Watch has said the strike should be investigated as an apparent war crime. Amnesty International separately raised legal concerns about the Saada detention-facility strike. CENTCOM, defending the Ras Isa attack at the time, said "the strike was not intended to harm the people of Yemen," framing it instead as an effort to cut off a fuel source funding Houthi operations.
The office meant to prevent this has been hollowed out
The casualty numbers landed alongside a separate Pentagon filing that tells a related story: steep cuts to the unit responsible for limiting civilian harm in the first place. According to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence's own annual report, its staff fell from around 40 people to just nine by the end of the last fiscal year. Officials speaking anonymously told CBS News that the broader civilian-harm mitigation program has shrunk by roughly 90% in personnel since March 2025, and the administration's 2026 budget request explicitly seeks the program's "disestablishment."
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pushed to loosen the rules of engagement, telling senior military officers he wants "maximum lethality, not tepid legality." He has also removed the Army's, Navy's and Air Force's top uniformed lawyers from their posts. In earlier testimony before lawmakers, Hegseth insisted the military does not target civilians and takes steps to avoid harming them.
The bigger test still ahead
None of this touches the most consequential open question hanging over the Pentagon's civilian-harm record: a missile strike in the opening hours of this year's war with Iran that destroyed a girls' elementary school in Minab. Iranian officials have said the Feb. 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school killed roughly 170 people, most of them children. The Pentagon has not released its own findings, though a preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment has described American forces as likely responsible.
The Atlantic reported last month that the department is weighing whether to restore as many as half of the civilian-harm positions it has eliminated — a decision reportedly driven in part by the fallout from the Minab strike. How that investigation is ultimately resolved could determine whether the safeguards built up after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan still mean anything, or whether 2025's toll simply becomes the new normal.
Originally published on Latin Post
