The U.S. military attacked an immigrant detention center in Yemen earlier this year, killing and injuring dozens of Ethiopian civilians, according to a new report by Amnesty International shared with The Intercept. Conducted during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government, the strike constituted an indiscriminate attack under international humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime, according to Amnesty.

“I was buried under the rubble and after about one hour my brother came and pulled me out,” one of the survivors told Amnesty. “I was bleeding. … I had a head injury and I lost sight in one eye. … It is a miracle we survived and got out of that place.” The April 28, 2025, strike on the facility in Sa’ada, in Yemen’s northwest, killed 61 detainees and injured another 56, according to Houthi records.

“This was a lethal failure by the U.S. to comply with one of its core obligations under international humanitarian law: to do everything feasible to verify whether the object attacked was a military objective,” said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, who called on the United States to investigate the attack as a war crime. “The harrowing testimonies from survivors paint a clear picture of a civilian building, packed with detainees, being bombed without distinction.”

Amnesty International interviewed 15 survivors of the attack on the Sa’ada detention center, and people who visited it and two nearby hospitals and their morgues in the immediate aftermath of the strike. (Their names are withheld from the report to protect them from reprisal.) Amnesty’s researchers also analyzed satellite imagery and video footage, including scenes showing bodies strewn across the compound, rescuers pulling badly wounded survivors from rubble, and the injured immigrants in hospitals.

Of the 15 survivors with whom Amnesty International spoke, 14 suffered significant injuries, including lost limbs, serious nerve damage, and head, spine, and chest trauma. Two of the 15 had their legs amputated, one had one of his hands amputated, and one lost one of his eyes.

“I saw 25 injured migrants in the Republican Hospital and nine in Al Talh General Hospital. … They suffered from different fractures and bruises. Some were in critical condition and two had amputated legs,” one witness to the aftermath recalled. “The morgue in the Republican Hospital was overwhelmed and there was no place left for tens of corpses that were still left outside the morgue for the second day.”

Amnesty International requested information about the strikes from Central Command, which overseas military operations in the Middle East, as well as from Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units. Central Command issued a boilerplate response, stating that it is in the process of investigating, takes reports of civilian harm seriously, and assesses them thoroughly. JSOC failed to respond to Amnesty’s request.

Four current and former U.S. officials told The Intercept that JSOC, which operates under Special Operations Command, was responsible for strikes in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider. SOCOM did not answer any of The Intercept’s questions about the strikes or the attack on the Sa’ada detention center.

An original battleground in the U.S. war on terror, Yemen is one of many majority-Muslim nations — from Afghanistan and Iraq to Niger and Somalia — ravaged in the forever wars. More than 940,000 people have died in America’s post-9/11 conflicts due to direct violence, almost 4 million have died indirectly from causes like food insecurity and battered infrastructure, and as many as 60 million people have been displaced, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The United States has conducted attacks in Yemen since 2002, ranging from commando raids and

© The Intercept