Washington, D.C. national security and foreign policy circles have been shaken since Monday by the news that the editor-in-chief of the news magazine The Atlantic was added to a private chat with top Trump administration officials. That chat group was formed to discuss a military operation in Yemen targeting the Houthis for disrupting trade through a narrow ship channel crucial for international trade and to send a message to Iran. Via text, the Defense Secretary said, “This not about the Houthis.”
It’s worth noting that the U.S. has a long history of attacking Yemen for reasons that have little or nothing to do with consideration for the people who live there. One of President Trump’s early moves in his first term was greenlighting a disastrous military raid in Yemen, which led to civilian casualties the U.S. only later acknowledged. President Biden began airstrikes against the Houthis, with partners, in 2024. Presidents from Bush to Obama to Trump and back again have carried out drone strikes in Yemen, which have killed and wounded civilians. Trump’s team has now escalated U.S. attacks, discussed via chat.
Implications for Yemeni civilians
News outlets have focused on the national security implications of the Signal chat. But the implications of the strikes in Yemen on Yemeni civilians has been largely ignored. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been considering gutting the offices and policies that were put in place by the Defense Department itself in order to better protect civilians from U.S.-led strikes. A follow-up report by The Atlantic that published additional screenshots of the messages reveals a casual mention of targeting the “top missile guy” for the Houthis as he walked into his girlfriend’s residential building. According to the text from Waltz, the building was “now collapsed.” Vice President JD Vance then allegedly responded “Excellent.” Followed by the CIA director chiming in with “A good start.” From there, Waltz responded with emojis.
International humanitarian law & targeting decisions
International humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, requires attacking parties to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians. While sometimes even lawful strikes can cause civilian harm, whoever is using lethal force—in this case, the U.S.—must take precautions to protect civilians, and must consider whether the expected harm to civilians is outweighed by the value of the military objective. In other words, if the building was full of civilians, was the risk of killing and maiming them worth the military advantage gained by going after the “top missile guy”?
We don’t know what steps the U.S. Central Command took to mitigate civilian harm, and in addition to explaining their use of Signal for classified communications and their inclusion of a reporter on that chain, U.S. military leaders should provide that important information. Amnesty has not completed an investigation on the ongoing strikes and their compliance with international humanitarian law, specifically about whether the strike was proportional and all feasible measures were taken to minimize civilian harm.
In the meantime, we have serious concerns. The Tomahawk missiles mentioned in the chat carry very large warheads with wide area effects which are likely to cause civilian harm if used in densely populated areas. And here are already troubling reports of civilian harm. Airwars, for example, which tracks and analyzes open-source information, has tracked women and children being killed and injured. Reuters took footage showing children being treated for injuries after a strike. Unfortunately, the Houthis’ ongoing crackdown on civic space, including their targeting of activists. journalists, human rights and humanitarian workers, has made it increasingly challenging to conduct research on the ground. The U.S. government, however, must reveal what it knew before the strike and the efforts it took to minimize civilian harm.
Civilian harm in past airstrikes
The U.S. has a history of causing civilian harm in its airstrikes. Amnesty International and others have extensively documented cases, including under the first Trump administration. For example, in 2017, Amnesty did extensive research into the U.S.-led coalition’s campaign in Raqqa, Syria when homes, businesses and infrastructure were bombarded. The U.S.-led Coalition’s military claimed to have taken all necessary measures to spare civilians. Our research showed differently. In one incident, eerily similar to the situation referenced in the Signal chat, a Coalition airstrike destroyed a five-story residential building. That strike killed at least 32 civilians – four men, eight women and 20 children – sheltering in the building.
In Somalia, Amnesty found in 2020 that while U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted hundreds of air strikes in the decade-long fight against the armed group Al-Shabaab, at the time it had only admitted to killing civilians in a single strike. Amnesty further unearthed evidence that AFRICOM killed two civilians, and injured three more, in two air strikes in February 2020. After both strikes, AFRICOM issued press releases claiming it had killed an Al-Shabaab “terrorist,” without offering a shred of evidence of the victims’ alleged links to the armed group. By contrast, Amnesty International found no evidence that the individuals killed or injured were members of Al-Shabaab or otherwise directly participating in hostilities. The organization interviewed the victims’ relatives, community members and colleagues; analyzed satellite images, photo and video evidence from the scene of the strikes; and identified the U.S. munitions used. Ultimately, AFRICOM was forced to admit they had killed one woman and injured her family members.
Cases like these led to pressure—both within the defense and national security community and outside of it—to adopt better policies and processes to address civilian harm. In the past two months, however, the Trump administration has threatened to unravel the important work started in his first administration and carried forward under President Biden to ensure the U.S. did more to prevent and address civilian harm.
President Trump’s first defense secretary, James Mattis, ordered a study on civilian deaths in Iraq related to U.S. airstrikes. From that initiative grew a variety of policies and efforts, including an office called the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the center was being gutted. Last month, CBS reported President Trump quietly “rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and special operation raids outside conventional battlefields,” a policy shift that according to an expert quoted in the report “inherently raises the risk of flawed decisions and unintended civilian casualties.” In other words, these initiatives were meant to prevent the sort of civilian harm so casually ignored in the leaked Signal chat. The fact that Defense Secretary Hegseth recently fired the top military lawyers responsible for ensuring compliance with the laws of war makes the complete failure to consider civilian harm in that chat even more alarming.
What is missing from the current national security conversation around the Signal chat are important questions about where civilian harm mitigation and response fits into this administration’s defense strategy, as well as what steps were taken to minimize civilian harm in the airstrikes the U.S. has already conducted in Yemen and how the U.S. plans to respond to any civilian harm it may have caused. Members of Congress should ensure that any oversight they exercise includes these important questions.
Background
The new wave of U.S. strikes came after the Houthis announced on March 11 that they would resume attacks on Israeli ships passing through the Red and Arabian seas in response to the Israelis blocking aid into Gaza. Since March 15, the Houthis have launched missiles and drones at the USS Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Red Sea. They have also resumed their attacks on Israel.
Between November 2023 and January 2025, Houthi armed forces have targeted at least 74 commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, which they claimed were linked to Israel, the USA or the UK. On March 6, Houthi armed forces attacked the MV True Confidence in the Gulf of Aden, killing three of its crew members and injuring at least four others. They sank two commercial vessels, seized the Galaxy Leader and arbitrarily detained its 25 crew members for over a year.