The crime of Houthis bombing houses

Under the title "A decade of bombing and displacement... ten years of an ongoing crime", the Civil Authority for Victims of House Bombings documented a comprehensive report monitoring the bombing cases carried out by the terrorist Houthi militias between 2014/2024 in sixteen Yemeni governorates, with Marib ranked first with 130 houses out of a total of 884.

The report aims to bring this Houthi crime back to the forefront of local and international public opinion, after the silence and disregard of world opinion, despite the fact that this act falls within the category of war crimes and genocide criminalized by international law and the International Court of Justice.

In the last century, which witnessed the fiercest wars that the planet has ever experienced, the world has never known one of the warring parties, whether the victor or the defeated, to go to blow up the homes of civilians, even if they were opponents. Entire cities may be destroyed in the context of battles and military confrontations, but the individual targeting of homes is not included in the dictionary of wars, except in the Hashemite dynastic dictionary.

Some may imagine that bombing houses is a newly invented Houthi act, born during the six Houthi wars in which the group used to bomb the houses of some of its opponents, considering them tools and eyes of the government fighting them, or the post-coup phase.

But the bloody history of the Hashemites refutes this perception and reveals the truth of this immoral and inhuman act. The Hashemites, the imported lineage - since they set foot in Yemen as a marginal and minority fortified by the prophetic status to transform into a political authority with religious sanctity authorized to take over the reins of government in Yemen at the hands of its founder, Al-Hadi Yahya bin Al-Hussein Al-Rassi - have been adopting this method to suppress opponents of their authority and those who reject their domination, until blowing up homes became a legitimate act and a fixed certainty followed as a sectarian lineage approach rooted in the Hashemite faith, and the lineage adopted it as an inherent behavior to deal with its opponents in various times and from different lineages.

The new Imamis have revived this criminal approach since their coup, ready to denigrate their predecessors and to punish those who reject their project. They have expanded their bombing of homes in every governorate, district and village without exception. Some were demolished on the heads of their residents and some were empty. What is most important to them is that they become ruins like barren land, and a clear lesson to anyone who dares to stand in their way.

What is interesting is that this heinous act has remained invisible in the mirror of world public opinion, its human rights and humanitarian organizations, the United Nations and the UN Security Council for a whole decade until now. These prestigious international entities always claim to care about the lives of civilians in all corners of the earth, denounce the violations that befall them everywhere, shed light on their perpetrators and lead world opinion entirely towards any persecution that is not in the mood of the international community and its contradictory engineering in accepting it from one group and rejecting it from another terrorist group.

When the group was involved last year in the bombing of several homes with their residents in the Rada’a area, and the crime came to light, it sought by all means to cover up the case, justify its occurrence, and pin the blame on some of its leaders and sacrifice them as individuals in order to avoid tarnishing its reputation internally and externally, and to escape international sanctions.

The group has not stopped practicing this approach. Last week, it burned and blew up a citizen’s house in Al-Qafr District, Ibb, in response to Facebook posts criticizing it from the victim’s children. This horrific development indicates that the group is continuing to silence all its critics in this way. Blowing up houses is no longer limited to its active opponents, fighters on the front lines, prominent politicians, or media professionals who expose its crimes in various media outlets.

Therefore, sensing the dangers of the international community’s silence and disregard for this issue will whet the Houthis’ appetite to continue committing it against the Yemenis, and it will become the only method used by the Houthis to suppress every person who disagrees with their opinion or objects to their policy or is accused without guilt, and the Houthis will punish them in this manner.

It would be very shameful and a shameful paradox to talk about peace agreements or to propose any international initiative or proposals for political negotiated solutions with a terrorist group that practices all forms of violence and abuse against a society under its authority. How can a legitimate government that has been fighting it for ten years negotiate with it and the group aspires to control the liberated areas to make its people taste its criminal acts such as blowing up homes and other endless crimes?