Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned recent Israeli airstrikes on Yemen’s Hodeidah port as war crimes, highlighting the attacks’ severe impact on food, aid, and electricity supplies for millions of Yemenis.
The Israeli airstrikes on Hodeidah port on the evening of July 20, 2024, were an apparently unlawful indiscriminate or disproportionate attack on civilians that could have a long-term impact on millions of Yemenis who rely on the port for food and humanitarian aid, HRW reported on Monday.
The report added that the Israeli airstrikes, which killed at least six civilians and reportedly injured at least 80 others, hit more than two dozen oil storage tanks and two shipping cranes in Hodeidah port in northwest Yemen, as well as a power plant in Hodeidah’s Salif district. The attacks appeared to cause disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects. Serious violations of the laws of war committed willfully, that is deliberately or recklessly, are war crimes.
Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces damaged or destroyed at least 29 of the 41 oil storage tanks at Hodeidah port, as well as the only two cranes used for loading and unloading supplies from ships. The airstrikes also destroyed oil tanks connected to the Hodeidah power plant, causing the power plant to stop operating for 12 hours.
Israeli warplanes targeted civilian buildings, oil facilities, and a power station in the Yemeni province of Hodeidah, killing eight citizens and injuring 87 others.
Brushing off official accounts that the airstrikes had targeted civilian structures, Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari alleged that the regime’s aircraft had struck “military targets” in Hodeidah.
He also said the strikes had come in response to the attacks that the Yemeni Armed Forces had been carrying out against the occupied Palestinian territories over the past months.
The Yemeni Armed Forces have been targeting the territories as well as Israeli ships and vessels affiliated with the occupying regime since October 7, when Tel Aviv began a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip. They have vowed to keep up their operations as long as the regime sustains the war and a simultaneous siege that it has been enforcing against the Palestinian territory.
Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Yahya Sare’e announced after the airstrikes that the response to Israeli aggression would include “vital targets of the Israeli enemy,” reiterating their previous statement that Yafa (Jaffa) is considered an unsafe area.
