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UK aids US bombing of Yemen even as it hits hospital for second time

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been resisting Israel’s genocide in Gaza by targeting ships heading to the apartheid state. In defence of its imperialist outpost in Israel, the US has been bombing Yemen, with British support. And the UK’s assistance in this campaign comes despite the US hitting a cancer hospital for the second time on Tuesday 25 March.

Attacking hospitals and other civilian sites is wrong, but US-UK-Israel axis thinks it’s fine

The UN considers attacks on hospitals a grave violation and international humanitarian law urges their protection. However, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has sought to normalise the brutal targeting of medical facilities, with media complicity. In a similar way, the BBC and others have been minimising or omitting the key fact that Houthis only plan to resist until the genocide and blockade of Gaza stop.

Houthi attacks have been focusing on targeting US warships and Israeli military sites rather than civilian infrastructure. A week of US airstrikes, on the other hand, has murdered “at least 25 civilians including four children”, and “over >55% of strikes hit civilian sites” in Yemen. These included medical facilities and a school. And Israel has a “track record of exclusively bombing civilian sites” in the country.

The axis sees more war, including in Yemen, as preferable to ending genocide

Rather than trying to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and Britain have supported the apartheid state by bombing Yemen around 25 times month since January 2024.

Britain’s faithful support for the US as it violates international law deserves intense scrutiny, as does its continuing role as a junior partner to the US imperialist project.

The UK’s ongoing support for Israel’s war criminal regime, meanwhile, deserves the attention of the international legal system that has issued arrest warrants for Israeli politicians. RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus should be a particular focus, as it has been a major source of British participation in the Gaza genocide. In October 2024, Al Jazeera revealed that Britain had flown nearly half (47%) of 1,600 Israeli reconnaissance missions over Gaza up to that point, and Israel itself had only flown 20%.

The US empire is a mess, and Israel’s genocide has played a key role

Yemen’s resistance, however, isn’t going away easily. The US Navy, for example, has apparently “used more missiles for “air defense” since combat operations against the Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea off the Yemeni coast began in October 2023 than it used in all years since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s”:

And the bombing of Yemen in defence of Israeli war criminals has only served to expose the unconstitutional obsession US politicians from both red and blue wings of the corporate party have with forever wars. Some lone voices in Congress have pointed out that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have “been bombing Yemen for over a year, effectively carrying out a war without authorization from Congress”, which should be necessary to allow “military action like the airstrikes on Yemen”.

Because most Republicans and Democrats (and mainstream media outlets) serve the pro-Israel lobby faithfully, debating war on behalf of the settler-colonial state is not an option. Instead, they’re currently arguing over the Trump administration leaking sensitive information about the airstrikes in Yemen, and the “potential laws and norms broken by the leak”, rather than the fact that the US has unconstitutionally embarked on a military campaign that has bombed a hospital and killed civilians, all to protect a genocidal rogue state.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.