Badr[1] didn’t know how long he had been trapped beneath the rubble. The impact of the airstrike had knocked him unconscious, and he was disoriented as his senses slowly returned. He called out for his wife, and then for his two sons and two daughters—one by one. He hoped they were not trapped as he was—or worse dead—but he could not recall who had been where when the strike hit. Had it been day or night? Was it a school day or a weekend? Had his wife been visiting her parents or cooking lunch? He heard someone groaning, and then he realized it was himself. “Is this even my house?” he wondered.
Half of Badr’s throbbing brain searched for the answers, and the other half begged to sink back into the black solace of unconsciousness. Yes, he had been working that week. He remembered. A wealthy family had hired him to renovate the third floor of their home for their son who was soon to marry. Badr was a sought-after interior designer who was known for his tasteful eye and elegant touches that transformed ordinary rooms into living spaces with a warm and graceful ambiance. Now, however, as his mind groped to orient itself, fragmented images from his 42 years of life flashed in his mind in rapid succession. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and his eyes flew open as he was startled into the present moment by sunlight filtering through the cracks in the debris that had entombed him. For a moment, he was mesmerized by the dust particles suspended in the sunbeams. Had he been lying there with his eyes closed for seconds or days? He didn’t know. Then suddenly, he was aware of the dust in his throat constricting his airway, and he was sure he was going to suffocate. He inhaled deeply through his nose and was immediately overwhelmed by his wife’s scent. Turning his head to look for her, he saw the vial of perfume he’d bought her for their anniversary oozing its contents into his shattered world. So, it was his home. He prayed that his wife had been visiting her parents. Then something else caught Badr’s eye—a bottle of the local brand of water they kept stocked to serve guests, miraculously still intact and within reach. Desperate to moisten his parched throat, Badr eagerly opened the bottle and drank. And he immediately lost consciousness again.
The airstrike that trapped Badr in the rubble of his home for five hours happened in 2016—early in Yemen’s war that has continued for a decade as of March 2025.[2] Although he was rescued and eventually regained consciousness, the bottle he drank from was the last thing he ever saw. In his thirsty daze under the rubble, Badr had forgotten that he sometimes recycled empty water bottles by filling them with products he needed for work—like paint thinner, which is what he drank. Although the toxic liquid robbed him of his sight, today, at 50, Badr still has a sharp mind and has worked hard to live resiliently with his disability. Also, mercifully, his wife and all four of their children had been visiting her parents at the time of the strike—so the family suffered no other casualties in the event. Unfortunately, in the following years, one of Badr’s two sons sustained severe injuries in a motorcycle accident. His recovery required seven surgeries, including the amputation of one of his feet. Badr’s resolve in the face of loss inspired his son through his own rehabilitation, nonetheless the family of six has now been left to subsist on what amounts to an income of $225 a year and sporadic assistance they receive from non-profits or charitable people. Thus, like many other Yemenis who have been displaced, disabled, and economically crippled by the protracted conflict, they are still being buried alive in its compounding impacts.
According to the World Bank’s calculations, conflict, rapid population growth, and inflation have pushed Yemen from being the 41st poorest country in the world before the outbreak of its conflict in 2015 to the 7th poorest by 2023. In September 2024, World Food Program (WFP) assessments indicated that 64 percent of Yemeni families were reporting inadequate food consumption—the highest rates recorded in the conflict to date. Moreover, according to the UN’s 2025 Yemen Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, an estimated 19.5 million people—half of Yemen’s population—need humanitarian aid. That reflects an increase of 1.3 million people over 2024 when the United States funded over 35 percent of the humanitarian response in the country,[3] much of it through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This year, nearly all of that lifesaving aid has been paused as a result of the new US administration’s freeze on the organization’s operations around the world. Meanwhile, the week of March 13-19, 2025, saw the most civilian casualties (72) reported in Yemen in at least six months, driven primarily by renewed airstrikes carried out by the United States (US)—which accounted for 53 of the casualties. The strikes were ordered as a response to Houthi[4] attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and its adjacent maritime corridors,[5] which the group has said it carries out in defense of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza. However, no Houthi attacks on commercial shipping had been reported since the Gaza ceasefire agreement was announced in January 2025.[6]
The surging impact of armed violence on civilians in Yemen in March 2025 came in the wake of an estimated 70 percent decrease in confrontations between the nation’s warring parties in the 34 months following a fragile truce that limited frontline hostilities beginning in April 2022.[7] However, with frontline violence paused during those months, Yemeni civilians experienced heightened levels of repression around the country as spaces for grassroots activism, political dissent, and freedom of expression shrunk.[8] Throughout 2024, of nearly 2,900 events of armed violence tracked in Yemen by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project—more than 800, or over 25 percent, represented violent attacks directly targeting civilians or their property—including abductions, forced disappearances, and arbitrary arrests. Specifically, the number of abductions, forced disappearances,[9] and arbitrary arrests reached their highest levels of any year since 2015, according to ACLED’s tracking, with some of the 344 such events recorded by the project in 2024 representing the detention of hundreds of individuals. This represents an increase of more than 30 percent over the previous highest annual total of 262 such events in 2020.
In the midst of these dynamics, vulnerable Yemenis like Badr’s family carry on at the mercy of warring parties inside and outside their nation—subject to being buried in or disappeared from their own homes—all the while they continue to suffer under economic storms relentlessly pushing the prices of basic necessities further out of their reach. Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization that advocates for human rights, has argued that civilians like Badr who have been impacted by acts of war are due prompt, effective, and adequate reparations, as well as other forms of amends under international law. However, has Badr keeps rising each day to navigate the challenges of Yemen without his sight, the world remains largely deaf to the calls of organizations like Mwatana for such redress and regard for civilian life.[10]
[1] Names changed to protect vulnerable Yemeni civilians.
[2] SMC marks the start of Yemen’s conflict as March 26, 2015, when the Saudi-led intervention began in support of southern Yemeni forces battling to expel the Houthis (from Yemen’s north) from Aden. The Houthis did not face significant armed resistance to their takeover of Yemen’s major cities and ports, which began in September 2014, until they entered the southern city of Aden in March 2015.
[3] Between 2015-2021, USAID was the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance in Yemen, according to the UN.
[4] The Houthis are a Zaydi Shia religious revivalist movement that took over Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, in 2014.
[5] A Pentagon spokesperson has said that the Houthis attacked commercial vessels 145 times and US warships 174 times in maritime attacks in and around the Red Sea between October 7, 2023, and January 2025 using drones and missiles. Their attacks struck at least 48 vessels, and two were sunk—with four attacks resulting in a total of four crew members killed and at least six injured. Another ship was hijacked—and its 25 crew members were held hostage by the Houthis for 430 days before being transferred to Oman in January 2025, for release in association with the Gaza ceasefire agreement announced between Israel and Hamas.
[6] Al Jazeera, The BBC, The Civilian Impact Monitoring Project (CIMP), Action Against Hunger, BBC, The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, The World Bank
[7] The truce officially expired after six months, but in the 34 months from April 2022 through February 2025, frontline hostilities have not returned to the levels observed in the 34 months prior to the truce.
[8] https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/barometer-houthi-repression-governance-and-infighting-ibb-governorate
[9] Forced disappearance occurs when authorities detain a person and then refuse to acknowledge their whereabouts or situation when asked.
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuLeFbdnDVU&t=2s
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