Oxfam Study: At Least 87 Yemeni Civilians Killed by UK and US Weapons from January 2021-February 2022.
Oxfam unveiled that “At least 87 civilians were killed by airstrikes from the #Saudi-led coalition in #Yemen using weapons supplied by the #UK and #US between January
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2021 and February 2022.”
The charity accused the #UK government of ignoring an identifiable “pattern of harm” caused by the indiscriminate bombing – and argues it amounts to legal grounds for #Britain to end elements of its lucrative arms trade with #Riyadh.
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Martin Butcher, a policy adviser at Oxfam, said that there had been 431 airstrikes in the period monitored, roughly one a day, and that the “intensity of these attacks would not have been possible without a ready supply of arms.”
The sheer number of attacks, the 87
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civilians killed and 136 wounded amounted to, Butcher added, “a pattern of violence against civilians” which all parties to the conflict, including arms suppliers, had failed to prevent.
A further 13 airstrikes carried out by #British or #American-made jets had taken
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place on hospitals and clinics, the Oxfam research added, with farms and homes routinely hit. Civilians were forced to leave their homes or places of shelter after a total of 293 raids from the air.
According to the charity, “The Saudi air force uses Typhoon and Tornado
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aircraft sold and maintained by Britain and F-15s from the US.”
Some of the bombs used, such as the Paveway IV, are made in the UK – and the Campaign Against Arms Trade [CAAT] estimates that the total value of #UK arms sales to Saudi since it began its aggression on
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#Yemenwar in 2015 to be £23bn.
At the end of this month, the high court will hear a fresh appeal from CAAT against the UK's decision to resume the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia that could be used in #Yemen in 2020. It stresses that the #UK is acting unlawfully by ignoring
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potential war crimes.
Then trade secretary Liz Truss had ordered the restart – halted because CAAT won an earlier case at the court of appeal – after a review concluded there had been only “isolated incidents” of airstrikes that breached humanitarian law.
Source:the Guardian
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