Pentagon reports US military operations killed 153 civilians in Yemen in 2025

A newly released Pentagon report formally acknowledges that U.S. military operations killed 153 civilians and injured 243 in Yemen during 2025, with all confirmed casualties linked to three April 2025 airstrikes under Operation Rough Rider. The disclosure comes amid severe budget and staffing cuts to the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation programs under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Critics and human rights groups have condemned the report as a whitewash for excluding over 220 deaths from controversial U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Yemen civilian casualties

• ▪The Pentagon report noted that as of February 2026, U.S. Central Command was still assessing 15 other incidents in Yemen for potential civilian casualties.
• ▪A Pentagon report submitted to Congress on August 10, 2026, formally acknowledged that U.S. military operations killed 153 civilians and injured 243 in Yemen during 2025.
• ▪The Yemen Data Project reported that U.S. military operations in Yemen during 2025 killed at least 238 civilians, including 24 children, and injured 467 others.
• ▪The Pentagon report attributed all confirmed U.S. military civilian casualties in 2025 to three specific airstrikes conducted in Yemen during April 2025.

Operation Rough Rider

• ▪A U.S. airstrike on April 17, 2025, near Ras Isa Port killed 80 civilians and injured 171, an incident Human Rights Watch stated should be investigated as a war crime.
• ▪A U.S. airstrike on April 6, 2025, near Sanaa killed five civilians and injured 25 at a residence, according to the Pentagon assessment.
• ▪Under Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. military conducted airstrikes from March to May 2025 against Iran-backed Houthi targets to protect commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
• ▪A U.S. airstrike on April 28, 2025, near Saada struck a migrant detention center, killing 47 or 68 civilians and injuring dozens of African migrants.

Pentagon harm mitigation cuts

• ▪Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, pledging to focus on maximum lethality rather than legal constraints.
• ▪The Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request proposed reducing civilian harm mitigation personnel funding by over $2 million and mission support by more than $9.5 million.
• ▪Staffing at the Pentagon's Civilian Protection Center of Excellence dropped from 40 employees to nine full-time employees by the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

Boat strike exclusion controversy

• ▪The Pentagon's 2025 civilian casualty report excluded casualties from the Trump administration's campaign of boat strikes targeting suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific.
• ▪Human rights groups and legal experts stated that the U.S. boat strikes, which killed over 220 people since September 2025, constitute unlawful extrajudicial killings.
• ▪U.S. Southern Command assessed that as of February 1, 2026, no civilian casualties resulted from U.S. military operations in its area of responsibility during 2025.

Congressional reporting requirements

• ▪Section 1057 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the Pentagon submit annual reports to Congress detailing civilian casualties from U.S. military operations.
• ▪The Pentagon's annual civilian casualty reports recorded nearly 500 civilian deaths in 2017, which decreased to one in 2023 and two in 2024 before rising in 2025.

7 sources