US bombers killed at least 31 people in Yemen at the weekend, mainly women and children in residential areas.
With Donald Trump, there is none of the pretence affected by previous presidents that strikes seek to avoid civilian casualties. “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective,” he rails. If Yemen’s Houthi government does not stop its attacks on Israeli-linked shipping, he threatens that “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN ON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE SEEN BEFORE.”
Yemen’s people have had their share of hell. Before China brokered a deal restoring long-severed relations between Iran, the Houthis’ main ally, and Saudi Arabia in 2023, they suffered eight years of Saudi bombing. The Saudi air force was relaxed about bombing residential neighbourhoods, hospitals and schools: in one infamous atrocity in 2018, it blew up a school bus, killing 29 children.
The UN estimates the war — aimed at restoring the Yemeni government in exile, overthrown by the Houthis in 2014 — killed over 150,000 people directly and more than another 200,000 from famine and disease as healthcare systems and sanitation infrastructure broke down.
Nonetheless, as Trump will discover, massacring civilians does not necessarily bring military victory. In eight long years the Saudis won no decisive victory over the Houthis despite vastly superior firepower, and never came close to dislodging the Houthi Supreme Political Council from Yemen’s capital Sanaa.
Trump’s bombs will kill innocent people: they will not stop attacks on shipping. Here we should note that there have not actually been any Houthi attacks on shipping since January’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed: the US air raids are in response to the warning that they plan to resume them because Israel is not abiding by the ceasefire.
So further attacks could be prevented if Israel were made to stop its attacks on Palestinians. Though the US puts the blame on Hamas for the failure to agree a second phase of the ceasefire, it is Israel which has reneged on its agreement to withdraw its forces from Gaza.
It has not stopped killing people in Gaza — its bombs killed another 14 there over the weekend. Worse still, it has brazenly used the fragile ceasefire in Gaza to escalate violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, driving tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and openly announcing they will not be allowed back for at least a year.
The failure to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose forces are also still bombing Lebanon and carving out an enlarged military occupation zone in Syria, is not just a crime against the Palestinian people. It has the potential to spark a wider war across the Middle East.
The United States already blames Iran for everything the Houthis do, though Tehran said today it is not providing assistance to the Yemeni group. The Trump administration says it will hold Iran “accountable” for Houthi actions.
Netanyahu’s desire to provoke a US-Iran war long predates the current invasion of Gaza, and such a war would entail death, destruction and destabilisation of the Middle East on an even greater scale than the criminal invasion of Iraq two decades ago.
The US and Israeli air forces engaged in threatening manoeuvres near Iran earlier this month, a provocation that has been answered by three-way naval exercises in the area by Iranian, Russian and Chinese warships. There could hardly be a starker example of how far and fast things could escalate.
All this is Britain’s business: not only does it continue to supply and advise the Israeli military, but the US bombers patrolling the Persian Gulf take off from bases on British soil. Doing what we can to prevent a catastrophic war is a responsibility of every British socialist — and key to it all is maintaining pressure on our government to end its complicity in the war on Palestine.
Source: Morning Star