Children and paramedics were among at least 80 civilians killed in the incident, Declassified can reveal.
Royal Air Force (RAF) refuelling planes supported US strikes on Yemen that the Pentagon assessed “more likely than not” resulted in 281 civilian casualties, it has emerged.
Britain’s involvement in the operation “may make them complicit in war crimes,” Human Rights Watch told Declassified.
…
Last year saw President Trump directly target the Houthis in Operation Rough Rider, which aimed to stop the group blockading Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea.
Britain – then led by Keir Starmer – provided aerial refuelling support during the two-month-long bombing campaign, with RAF Voyager tankers flying at least 25 missions from Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus.
…
It determined that 153 civilians were “likely” killed and a further 243 civilians injured in three particular air strikes during Operation Rough Rider, two of which Britain can be linked to.
The acknowledgement included one of the worst strikes for civilian harm ever recorded in Yemen, which experts say raises serious questions about Britain’s potential involvement.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/. New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is pursuing the same policy of active support of and denial of genocide by Israel.Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says Sundown Syndrome is a dead givaway and he wishes someone would Lock Him Up
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Israeli settlers are seen as Palestinian residents remain confined inside their homes in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus in the West Bank, on August 20, 2026, after the Israeli military declared three residential properties a “closed military zone” following repeated attacks and blockade by Israeli settlers. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called on the EU on Tuesday to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, urging European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to act on measures she proposed a year ago.
In a joint statement ahead of von der Leyen’s annual State of the EU address, the groups said “almost none” of the measures she proposed last year had been adopted.
They urged von der Leyen to revive her proposal to suspend the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and impose sanctions on Israeli officials and settlers, while also proposing an EU-wide ban on trade with Israeli settlements.
The groups said the EU was “lagging behind” as an increasing number of member states and allies moved to restrict trade with the settlements.
They pointed to the worsening situation in Gaza and the West Bank, saying the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza had risen to nearly 74,000 from at least 64,000 when von der Leyen delivered her previous address in 2025.
The groups said Israeli authorities continued to restrict humanitarian aid and had confined Gaza’s population to about 30% of the territory. They statement added that plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza were being openly discussed.
In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, HRW and Amnesty said settlement expansion had accelerated, alongside home demolitions, land seizures and the displacement of Palestinians.
They said at least 88 Palestinians, including 22 children, had been killed in the West Bank in 2026, bringing the total since October 2023 to nearly 1,100.
The groups also cited Israel’s adoption of a death penalty bill and the continued detention of Palestinians without charge or trial, alleging that many detainees had been subjected to torture.
On Lebanon, the statement said Israeli attacks had killed at least 4,383 people since the start of the March escalation, citing Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The figure included 261 children, 399 women and 135 medical workers.
The groups said von der Leyen should not rely solely on EU humanitarian aid to Palestinians and called on her to use the bloc’s influence to address the circumstances that have created the need for such aid.
They said she should “actively and vocally” engage with member states, particularly Germany and Italy, to secure support for an EU-wide settlement trade ban.
The organizations also called for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and sanctions against Israeli officials.
They urged the EU to consider using its blocking statute to protect the International Criminal Court and those cooperating with it from US sanctions.
The groups said another year of “failures, inaction and half-hearted proposals” would further undermine the EU’s credibility.
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Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
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U.S. President Donald Trump meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at White House in Washington DC, United States on July 28, 2026. [Ma’ayan Toaf (GPO)/Handout – Anadolu Agency]
Israel is seeking backing from President Donald Trump to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, as Israeli ministers speak openly about expelling the indigenous, non-Jewish communities from the territories occupied by the apartheid state. Defence Minister Israel Katz said yesterday that the “migration” of more than two million Palestinians out of the territory remains Israel’s preferred outcome.
Katz made the comments at a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
At the conference, Katz insisted, “There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration,” and said Israel was “organised and prepared to get them out – by sea, by air, by every way possible.” He argued that Washington’s backing was essential, since “every country willing to take them in wants American backing.”
According to Katz, Trump has “not cancelled” the proposal but has “frozen” it while his administration searches for countries willing to accept Palestinian refugees. Katz also claimed, without offering evidence, that 80 per cent of Gaza’s population wants to leave the territory and is being prevented from doing so by Hamas.
The ceasefire agreement he later sponsored, which took effect in October 2025, states explicitly that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so.” Egypt, which borders Gaza, has continued to reject any plan involving the removal of the territory’s population.
Katz’s remarks, made at a conference days before Israel’s general election, drew criticism in Washington. US Senator Chris Van Hollen said the admission confirmed what critics had long suspected: that Israel’s underlying objective in Gaza is the removal of its population rather than its security.
Forcibly transferring a civilian population out of occupied territory is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has already issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz’s predecessor, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have each concluded in recent years that Israel’s rule over Palestinians, from Gaza to the occupied West Bank, amounts to apartheid, a designation successive Israeli governments have rejected.
Many view Katz’s comments less as a new position than a public confirmation of Israel’s ultimate goal. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a settler conference on 26 November 2024 that it was “possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years” through what he called encouraging “voluntary emigration”, and suggested the same approach could later be applied to the three million Palestinians of the occupied West Bank.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has repeatedly called for Palestinians to be “encouraged” to leave Gaza so that Israelis can resettle it, telling a Jerusalem conference on 28 January 2024, “We must encourage them to leave.”
The rhetoric coincides with Israeli public opinion on the question. A survey published by Haaretz found that 82 per cent of Jewish Israeli respondents supported expelling Gaza’s population. The poll surveyed Jewish Israelis specifically and did not include Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who make up around a fifth of the population.
Writing in her regular Haaretz column, “Otherwise Occupied”, veteran journalist Amira Hass argued this week that the renewed talk in Washington and Jerusalem of a “two-state solution” functions, in practice, as a smokescreen. While officials and commentators debate Palestinian statehood, she wrote, the Israeli state is doing the practical and political groundwork for expelling Palestinians rather than for negotiating with them. Katz’s comments, made in the days after her column was published, appeared to bear that argument out.
Human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and B’Tselem, have for more than a year described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and have warned that any plan to depopulate the Strip would compound, rather than resolve, the suffering of its population. With Katz now confirming that removal remains official policy pending a green light from Washington, the question facing Palestinians in Gaza is no longer whether such a plan exists, but whether the US president will let it proceed.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says he wishes someone would lock him up, small Orca speaks bluntly.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
A boat burns after being bombed by US forces in the Pacific Ocean on May 29, 2026. (Photo by US Southern Command/screen shot)
One legal expert said the grim milestone raises the question of whether the US is committing a “crime against humanity.”
The US military on Friday bombed another boat it claimed was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing three more people in what experts say is an illegal campaign whose death toll has now topped 200.
US Southern Command said in a statement that “Joint Task Force Southern Spear,” the nine-month campaign ordered by President Donald Trump, “conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations.”
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” SOUTHCOM added, providing no evidence to support its claim. “Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No US military forces were harmed. SOUTHCOM is unwavering in its commitment to applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”
Friday’s strike brought the number of people killed during Southern Spear to 202 in at least 60 strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
On May 29, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking… pic.twitter.com/ynibuPqDd3
The Trump administration has tried to justify the strikes by claiming that the US is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. Many legal experts disagree.
Former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on X: “Now more than 200 Trump summary executions—blatant murders.”
“Legal experts agree: The Trump-ordered strikes on suspected drug boats are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence,” Roth said in a separate post.
Just Security editor-in-chief and New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman said that the “overwhelming consensus of experts, myself included, assess these to be murder because no armed conflict” is occurring, adding that they would be a “war crime if it were armed conflict.”
Goodman said that, with 200 people killed, the strikes raise the question of whether the US is committing a “crime against humanity.”
The boat strikes were fraught from the start. In the first known attack, US forces killed nine people in an initial strike and then two men clinging to the boat’s wreckage in a follow-up bombing.
The bombings have drawn widespread condemnation, including from Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who accused the US of “murder,” and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted during a US invasion in January and imprisoned in the United States on dubious narco-terrorism charges.
Regional leaders and relatives of survivors say that at least some of the victims of the US bombings were fishermen with no ties to narco-trafficking. In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.
The bombings have terrorized fishing communities along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts to the point where many people have given up the only means they had of supporting their families.
Congressional war powers resolutions aimed at reining in Trump’s ability to extrajudicially execute alleged drug traffickers in or near Venezuela failed to pass the Senate last October and the House in December.
“Not only are these killings illegal, they are immoral. People of good conscience cannot allow this to continue, yet Congress has so far failed to halt, or even slow down, this lethal and unlawful campaign,” Amnesty International USA national director for government relations Amanda Klasing said in a statement Wednesday.
“Lawmakers must do everything in their power to halt this campaign and hold everyone responsible accountable for their role in these extrajudicial killings,” she added.
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
This photo shows a view of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Camp East Montana detention center at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matter)
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel,” said one Cameroonian plaintiff in the suit. “No human being should ever have to go through this.”
A group of legal advocacy groups on Friday sued US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies and officials over “inhumane” conditions at the country’s largest concentration camp for immigrants detained during the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, Human Rights Watch, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel LLP filed suit against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and associated officials, in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four people seeking to represent a class action for all others held at Camp East Montana, a 60-acre facility located in the Chihuahuan Desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base and the site of one of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were imprisoned during World War II. Approximately 2,500 immigrants are being detained there.
Citing “a Civil Rights catastrophe,” a group of legal and civil rights organizations in Texas sued the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday over conditions at Camp East Montana in El Paso, the country’s largest immigration detention facility.More: substack.com/@shero/note/…
The lawsuit documents accounts of what the ACLU called “horrific rights violations” at the facility, including:
Severe medical neglect and disease outbreaks, including a months-long measles outbreak that infected at least 14 people;
Violent uses of force by officers against detained immigrants and coercive threats of deportation;
Excessive and arbitrary use of solitary confinement to punish people for requesting basic needs like medical care or hygiene;
Inadequate and rancid food that have caused detained people to lose extreme amounts of weight;
Exposure to dust storms through openings in tent walls that subjects people to respiratory disease; and
Dangerous and unsanitary living conditions in the tent camp, among other rights violations.
“These conditions are longstanding, pervasive, and well-documented, and defendants’ continued inaction in the face of known risks shows their deliberate indifference—not mere negligence—to detainees’ constitutional rights,” the lawsuit states.
At least three detainees have died at Camp East Montana, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban who, according to witnesses, died after being handcuffed and placed in a chokehold by guards. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Lunas Campos’ death a homicide by asphyxia.
Detained immigrants have reported beatings and sexual abuse, medical neglect, hunger and insufficient food, and denial of access to attorneys at the facility.
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel. No human being should ever have to go through this,” case plaintiff Gerald Akari Angye said in a statement Friday.
I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America,“ he continued. ”I have been beaten here and even today, I still have a brace on my hands and wrist. I am in pain and I am scared to be here.“
“No one deserves such cruel treatment,” Akari Angye added. “We are all humans and deserve to be treated like it.”
Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called Camp East Montana “nothing short of a civil rights catastrophe.”
“Since the day it opened, the facility has repeatedly made headlines for horrific rights violations and even the deaths of three detained people, yet ICE has still evaded accountability for its conduct,” Virgien added. “We’re suing to ensure that no other human being has to endure the inhumane treatment that the Trump administration has inflicted on our clients.”
Another case plaintiff, named in the suit as Navdeep, said, “It feels like we are just political pawns taken from our jobs and families and forced into a temporary tent that is not designed for human life.”
“We could die here, and it feels like no one here would care,” they continued. “With everything happening behind closed doors, I worry the people running this place might cover up the truth about a death or the other injustices that happen here.”
“It’s important for people to know the truth of what is happening here,” Navdeep added. “Being part of this lawsuit is important to me because many people are vulnerable or they become weak because of the conditions here. Even though we come from many different places, we are all human. I want to be a voice for everyone here.”
After receiving “numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment” of detainees, 35 Democratic Texas state lawmakers earlier this year demand a probe into alleged abuses at Camp East Montana.
Democratic members of US Congress have also sounded the alarm over conditions at Camp East Montana. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) has also called out profiteering by the private contractors running the camp.
This is misinformation. I visited the Dilley Detention Center in Frio County, Texas, and witnessed firsthand the facility’s inhumane conditions. Despite ICE’s claim that detainees receive “world-class” care, people I spoke with described untreated wounds, serious medical… https://t.co/daGpf9BKEl
— Congressman Christian D. Menefee (@RepCDMenefee) May 27, 2026
Amentum Services Inc. took over operations from Acquisition Logistics LLC earlier this year. The latter was never registered to operate in Texas and the former “has a history of health, safety, and other violations of federal law,” according to the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen.
The Trump administration is currently moving forward with a plan to convert industrial warehouses into more ICE concentration camps. The agency has already purchased or contracted for at least 11 warehouses in eight states as part of the $38 billion plan.
While some critics take exception to the concentration camp description, the ICE facilities fit the dictionary definition of the term. The US has a long history of operating concentration camps, with imprisoned peoples ranging from Indigenous tribes during the Trail of Tears and Long Walk to escaped and freed slaves—officially called “contraband” in the Civil War—to Filipinos, Okinawans, and Vietnamese during three different 20th century wars, to Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II.
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem,” talk show host and author Thom Hartmannwrote earlier this year for Common Dreams. “And that’s exactly what ICE is building now. History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
