Three Senate Democrats called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last Thursday to account for the scores of civilians reportedly killed in recent U.S. military strikes meant to target Houthi militants in Yemen, according to a report published by The Washington Post.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (Maryland), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and Tim Kaine (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 spokesman for Hegseth, Sean Parnell, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, a defense official indicated that the Defense Department is “aware of reports” that U.S. strikes in Yemen have led to civilian casualties and “takes these allegations very seriously and has a process to review them” — a reference to guidelines enacted under Trump’s predecessor requiring regular public reports on civilian harm cases.
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 Iranian-backed group that controls much of western Yemen.
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 Britain-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 that figure.
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 department 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.
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 that, together with the bombardment, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, according to the U.N. 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 time when many national security experts say the U.S. 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.