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The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home

“We had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

March 26 2025, 3:25 p.m.

The American political landscape has been rattledby revelations that the Trump administration discussed plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen in a chat group containing a journalist from The Atlantic. Senior Trump administration officials are facing tough questions about their operational security, use of consumer technology, and even their emoji usage.

So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.

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After revealing on Monday that its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been invited to the Signal chat group, The Atlantic published on Wednesday the actual messages in which top Trump administration officials laid out minute-by-minute operational details and specific weapons to be used in strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Atlantic opted to publish the chats — which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — only after the White House tried to deny classified details were shared.

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Before the “Houthi PC small group channel” Signal messages were released, Waltz announced that recent attacks had “taken out key Houthi leadership, including their head missileer.” 

“We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, prior to Goldberg’s revelations. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories, and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.” 

“We had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

In the group chat, however, Waltz indicated that in order to kill a Houthi official, the U.S. military destroyed a civilian home or apartment building.

“The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” wrote Waltz on Signal.

“Excellent,” Vance replied.

The attack was another in a long-running war — by the U.S. and its proxies — against the Houthis. For years, the United States backed an atrocity-filled air campaign led by Saudi Arabia against the militant group. Just after entering office, President Joe Biden formally delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group. After the Houthis began attacking ships — including U.S. warships — in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden in retaliation for the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, Biden reclassified them as terrorists and began launching attacks.

President Donald Trump began his own campaign of strikes targeting the Houthis earlier this month, after the Yemeni militants threatened to attack “Israeli” ships again over Israel’s blockade preventing aid entering the Gaza Strip. (The rebels have had an expansive definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, targeting vessels of various nations.) Trump’s air campaign has already killed more than 50 people since March 15.

“Too often the news coverage of the Signal chat leak has lacked any real discussion of the actual act of war itself.”

“Too often the news coverage of the Signal chat leak has lacked any real discussion of the actual act of war itself — the fact that the U.S. is bombing people in Yemen,” Stephanie Savell, the director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept. “Fifty-three people have died in this latest wave of U.S. airstrikes, five of them children. These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of U.S. killing in Yemen, and the research shows that U.S. airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

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Over the last century, the U.S. militaryhas shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable. These long-standing practices sit in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s public campaigns to sell its wars as benign, its air campaigns as precise, its concern for civilians as overriding, and the deaths of innocent people as “tragic” anomalies.

Last year, The Intercept drew attention to a racist and dehumanizing “morale patch” on the uniform of Lt. Kyle Festa, a pilot involved in the Biden administration’s war on the Houthis. Festa’s patch featured crosshairs over likenesses of the Tusken Raiders, the fictional “sand people” who attacked Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The patch read “Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024.”

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The Pentagon did not answer questions about the Trump administration’s targeting of the Houthi official’s “girlfriend’s building” or reports of civilian casualties resulting from the March 15 attack prior to publication. “Please direct your questions to the NSC,” an unnamed spokesperson replied by email, using the acronym for the National Security Council.

The White House told The Intercept that press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issues during a briefing on Wednesday. She did not mention civilian casualties and only referenced attacks on “Houthi terrorists.”

“At the very least this should prompt Americans to raise some serious, urgent questions about why and for what goals the U.S. military is killing Yemeni civilians,” said Savell.