Yemen Conflict and Civilian Casualties

When killing is taken lightly and justified, blood becomes water.

A Saudi-Emirati coalition airstrike ended the lives of dozens of Yemenis

in Saada Governorate, northern Yemen.

The airstrike targeted a bus carrying children under

the age of fifteen at Dahyan Market, according to UNICEF.

اليونيسيف.

What happened was a legitimate military operation, carried out

in accordance with international humanitarian law.

That is how the Saudi-led coalition justified it.

But the images coming from Yemen explain how such

a target can be legitimate and lawful.

In this context, the coalition stresses confronting what it called

the Houthis’ recruitment of children and sending them into battle,

noting that the airstrike dealt with those responsible for targeting

civilians in Jazan, Saudi Arabia. The Houthi group describes

the coalition’s justification as callous disregard for the lives of

civilians.

Between the millstones of killing and its justification, Yemen

and its people are ground down more and more. Yemen bids farewell to one

massacre only to receive another. Here, it does not seem that

Operation Decisive Storm has lived up to its name, as it has turned

the country into quicksand, where hope for

a near end to the war cannot take hold. The International Red

Cross is forced to state the obvious, saying in its

commentary on the latest chapter of killings, implicitly

responding to the coalition’s justification, that international

humanitarian law requires protecting civilians during conflicts,

not targeting them. The United Nations was even more

explicit when, for two consecutive years, it placed the

Saudi-Emirati coalition on the blacklist of violators of

children’s rights in conflict zones. The reports are many,

and international outrage is clear, but who cares?

A cycle of violence is spinning, and even international calls

do not seem able to curb it, at least not before the round

scheduled to be held in Geneva on the sixth of next September.

This was revealed by Martin Griffiths,

the UN envoy to Yemen, about a week ago, who also announced

specific confidence-building plans to advance

in the peaceful process toward ending the war.

But the situation in Yemen offers no cause for optimism, which

the United Nations described as the worst catastrophe in

the world. It is not poverty, cholera, and its spread across the country

that kill Yemenis, but political and moral

cholera as well