On Saturday, Yemen’s SABA news agency reported that footage shared by President Trump that showed a US airstrike in Yemen hit a religious gathering, not a Houthi military meeting as the president claimed.
Trump posted the video on his social media, which showed a group of people gathered in a large circle who were then bombed. “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack. Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!” the president wrote on X.
Trump added that the Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, will “never sink our ships again,” although there have been no known incidents of the Yemeni group sinking an American ship.
In response to the post, a source told SABA that the video showed an airstrike on a gathering for Eid, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. “The source explained that the video clip published by the criminal Trump, claiming that it was a gathering of military leaders, was merely an event for a social Eid visit in Hodeida province,” SABA reported.
The report said the source “emphasized that those present at that gathering had no connection to the operations carried out by the Yemeni Armed Forces, which are implementing the decision to ban navigation on ships linked to the American and Israeli enemy, as the criminal Trump claimed.”
Mohammed al-Houthi, a senior member of Ansar Allah’s political council, said the video was evidence of a US intelligence failure. “The video clip published by Trump and the situation of the visitors attest to the falsity of what he said. The video he published is in fact the targeting of an Eid social gathering,” he said. Users on social media were quick to point out that the circle of people resembled a common way Yemeni tribes gather.
A member of the US and Saudi-backed Yemeni government in exile, which is based in Saudi Arabia, claimed the US strike killed 70 Houthi fighters and several Iranian advisors but offered no evidence for the claim. At the time of the attack, there were no reports in Yemeni media of a major casualty in Hodeidah.
The US military has shared virtually no details about its bombing campaign in Yemen and has not offered specifics about the video that Trump posted. The president shared the footage on the same day that The New York Times reported that the daily airstrikes on Yemen have had “limited success” as the Houthis are not deterred and are not backing down.
The US bombing campaign has had a heavy toll on civilians, with at least 25 civilians being killed in the first week from March 15 to March 21, according to the Yemen Data Project.
