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# A Year After Deadly US Air Strike on Yemeni Migrant Detention Center: Grief and Unmet Demands for Justice for Ethiopian Victims

For tens of thousands of young Ethiopians trapped between persistent poverty at home and limited legal pathways to work abroad, the dangerous smuggling route across the Red Sea to Yemen is often seen as the only shot at a better future. Many set out with little more than a dream: to earn enough to lift their families out of hardship, build a stable life, and return home with dignity. For dozens of these young men, that dream ended abruptly on April 28, 2025, when a United States air strike hit a migrant detention facility in Saada, a Houthi-held region of northwest Yemen, leaving at least 68 people dead and dozens more permanently injured.

All of those killed were Ethiopian men, most in their early 20s, who had already endured years of peril and uncertainty before the strike. Among them was 20-something Hiwot Mehari, who grew up in the war-ravaged Tsirae district of Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Born into crushing poverty with almost no access to economic opportunity in his hometown, Mehari made the fateful choice to take the smuggling route out of Ethiopia, crossing the Red Sea to Yemen with plans to eventually reach Saudi Arabia for work. He spent two years in Rago, the lawless, violence-plagued border region between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, before being captured by Saudi border security and detained in the Saada facility.

Just 24 hours before the strike, Mehari spoke to his parents, telling them confidently, “They will release us soon and we will reunite.” The next day at noon, a neighbor delivered the devastating news to his family at their Tigray home. Mehari’s father, Mehari Akeza, says he still cannot process the loss of his son, who he waits for still. “I still can’t accept that my son is gone. I sometimes keep telling myself he will come back, and I wait for his call. How could I believe it? I wasn’t even able to properly bury my son,” Akeza told Middle East Eye in an interview, sitting alongside his heartbroken wife. His son’s mother, Mebrat Gebre, summed up the family’s agony with a question that remains unanswered: “America killed my son, my pride, why? I have never heard of a government killing prisoners for no reason.”

Mehari’s family is far from alone in their grief. The tragedy has mirrored the pain of hundreds of other Ethiopian families who have lost young relatives to the risks of irregular migration, a crisis that continues to drive thousands of young Ethiopians toward the Gulf each month despite its dangers. Another victim of the strike, 22-year-old Tsiruy Hailu, had left Ethiopia for Yemen in 2022 to fulfill his dream of supporting his family after his father died when he was a child. As the eldest of four children, Hailu had become the family’s sole breadwinner after his father’s death. “My soul is broken, he was my all,” his mother Berhan Akeza, 47, told reporters. “He wasn’t only my son, but also the one who carried the burden of the family after his father’s death 12 years ago.” Akeza’s pain was deepened after she saw graphic footage of the destroyed detention center, showing bodies crushed under rubble. Having already survived the Tigray war, which saw United Arab Emirates drone strikes kill countless civilians, she says the trauma of her son’s death haunts her constantly: “I saw the horrific footage on someone’s mobile phone. Sometimes, I picture my son lying with his body dismembered. I can imagine how drones kill a human being.”

Beyond the dozens killed, the strike left dozens more survivors facing permanent disability, lifelong trauma, and shattered futures. Middle East Eye spoke to three severely injured survivors, two still stranded in Yemen and one who has returned to Ethiopia, all dependent on others for basic care. Twenty-seven-year-old Haben Tuemzgi, who migrated to Yemen seven years ago hoping to save enough to open a business back home, suffered catastrophic injuries to both his legs and hands, with shrapnel still embedded in his bones that continues to cause worsening pain due to a lack of adequate medical care in Yemen. Speaking from Aden via WhatsApp, Tuemzgi described his existence as a limbo between life and death: “I am like a man between death and life. Sometimes I wish I had died instead of living like this. When I left my home, I had two legs and now I have to go back on a stretcher. Trump’s America has made all my dreams evaporate into thin air. What else can I do, I am poor. Who can sue the world’s most powerful?”

Twenty-five-year-old Haile Wolday, another survivor, lives with constant pain from wounds to his leg and hand, saying he sees no path forward. “I have no future to see. I came here to make money and feed my family but now people are feeding me,” he said. A third survivor, who returned home to Tigray’s Gulomekeda district and requested anonymity, suffers from severe injuries to his leg and eye that require ongoing treatment he cannot afford. “I was a man with a big dream before America turned my life upside down,” he said. “I never thought that I could be a burden to my family.”

More than a year after the strike, no progress has been made toward holding anyone accountable, providing answers to grieving families, or delivering compensation to victims and their relatives, according to Amnesty International. “One year on, US officials have failed to hold anyone accountable or even to clarify the status or outcome of the investigations they had announced a year earlier,” Erika Guevara Rosas of Amnesty International said in April. “Families of those killed in the attack on the detention centre in Yemen are still being denied basic information about what happened, [and] remain without justice for their loved ones.” The US State Department has not responded to requests for comment on the strike.

For the families of the victims, who live in remote rural areas of northern Ethiopia that are still recovering from years of brutal war, the silence from global powers has only deepened their pain. “The world seems to have forgotten our children’s death. We want compensation,” said Hiwot Mehari’s father Mehari Akeza. Girmachew Adugna, an Ethiopian migration scholar specializing in the Horn of Africa, says the demands of grieving families are clear: “The families of Ethiopian migrants who were killed in the strike deserve justice, including a transparent investigation, accountability and appropriate compensation where warranted.” He added that Ethiopia’s current migration framework fails young men who are pushed toward dangerous irregular routes: “Existing bilateral labour agreements largely provide opportunities for domestic work for women, leaving many young men with few legal migration options. Ethiopia’s labour migration strategy should place greater emphasis on protecting the rights, safety and wellbeing of migrant workers from when they depart to when they return.”

The strike has drawn attention to the growing irregular migration crisis in the Horn of Africa. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has sought to crack down on unregulated migration and signed bilateral agreements with Gulf states to improve working conditions for Ethiopian laborers, with the country’s labor and skills ministry reporting that more than 500,000 workers were legally dispatched abroad in 2025, and the government facilitates the repatriation of thousands of vulnerable migrants each year with the support of humanitarian groups. Still, the combination of limited decent work opportunities at home, post-conflict economic collapse in regions like Tigray, and a lack of legal migration pathways for young men continues to push thousands to take the dangerous route through Yemen. Data from the International Organisation for Migration shows that irregular migration to Yemen is rising: in June 2025 alone, more than 13,300 migrants entered Yemen, 95 percent of them from Ethiopia. Many of these migrants end up detained, abused, or killed before they ever reach their destination. For the families of the 68 young men killed in the Saada strike, the wait for justice and answers will continue, as the world’s most powerful nation remains unaccountable for their deaths.

The tragic case of Muhammed Abu Khammash, a 29-year-old Palestinian father of three with long-standing severe psychosis, lays bare the deadly human cost of Israel’s post-October 2023 military controls and territorial division of the Gaza Strip, even after the formal ceasefire took hold.

For years before the war began, Muhammed’s family managed his condition — marked by paranoia, delusions, and unpredictable episodes — with consistent care from the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre. During acute episodes, he would receive 2 to 4 weeks of inpatient monitoring and treatment that kept his symptoms stable. But when Israel launched its military campaign in October 2023, relentless airstrikes and widespread attacks on Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure destroyed access to this life-sustaining care. Forced to flee their home and live in overcrowded displacement tents, Muhammed’s relatives became his sole caregivers.

As the war dragged on, Muhammed’s mental state deteriorated dramatically. Two devastating family losses pushed his condition past the breaking point: first, 20-year-old brother Marwan was killed by Israeli forces while trying to collect flour for the family during Gaza’s worsening hunger crisis, and four months later, another younger brother Osama died in an Israeli airstrike while securing aid for a local orphanage. Grief unmoored Muhammed completely. He began repeatedly begging for death, shouting Osama’s name, and attempting to slip away to the Yellow Line — the de facto boundary that splits Gaza into Israeli-controlled and Palestinian-held territories — saying he wanted to find his brother or avenge his death.

Nine family members took turns standing constant watch over Muhammed to stop him from entering the restricted zone, a precaution that reflected the well-known risk: any Palestinian who approaches or crosses the Yellow Line is routinely shot on sight by Israeli soldiers. Yet even round-the-clock care could not hold him forever. One day, Muhammed slipped away from his family’s camp. He never came back.

The Yellow Line, established by Israeli forces on October 10, 2023, divides more than 60% of Gaza’s total territory off-limits to most Palestinians, confining the enclave’s population of roughly 2 million people to a shrinking sliver of land where overcrowding and humanitarian need have reached catastrophic levels. Israeli forces have marked the boundary with yellow concrete blocks, in some cases extending the restricted zone further into Palestinian-held territory than the original line. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed along the boundary since the ceasefire went into effect, and the true death toll remains unknown because Israeli restrictions bar families and humanitarian workers from recovering most victims’ remains, leaving bodies to decompose in open areas for weeks or months.

Three days after Muhammed disappeared, his father Oda Abu Khammash received the devastating confirmation: Muhammed had walked toward the Yellow Line, and Israeli soldiers had fired a shell that killed him instantly. What followed was a weeks-long ordeal to retrieve his body that Oda says was more painful than the loss of his son itself.

Access to the killing zone was completely blocked by the Israeli military, so the family turned to intermediaries with connections to Israeli-backed armed militias that operate along the Yellow Line. First acknowledged publicly by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June 2025, these militias were activated by Israel to undermine Hamas in controlled areas of Gaza, and have been widely accused of human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians, including extrajudicial killings, abductions, and looting of humanitarian aid. Though the militias were able to locate Muhammed’s remains, they told the family they could not recover the body without formal approval from the Israeli army — a request that was initially denied.

As Muhammed’s body lay exposed in the open for nine days, his mother refused to accept the impasse. Defying explicit orders to stay away and the constant threat of being shot, she carried a white flag and walked to the Yellow Line every day at dawn, staying until sunset to search for her son’s remains. Again and again, Israeli forces ordered her to turn back, warning they would open fire if she advanced. Each time, she refused: “If you want to shoot me, then shoot me. I’m not leaving until I bring back my son’s body,” she told soldiers through a quadcopter loudspeaker. She returned to a relative’s home near the line each night empty-handed, her anguish captured in a Facebook post by Oda, who wrote, “I haven’t seen her for two days. Before that, I avoided seeing her so she wouldn’t ask me: ‘What kind of life is this that we have, and what meaning does it hold?’ I am tired of being pitied.”

Nine days after Muhammed was killed, the Israeli army finally granted approval for his remains to be retrieved. The family was able to bury his remains in a grave that had been left open, waiting, for days. Photographs from local journalists show Muhammed’s mother clutching a black plastic bag holding his decomposed remains, the trauma of the ordeal still raw for the entire family.

“ I don’t exaggerate when I say the ordeal of recovering him was even harder than losing him,” Oda told Middle East Eye, a story that reflects the widespread, underreported suffering of Gaza’s families trapped between post-ceasefire military restrictions and unrelenting loss.

In a move aligned with a 2025 U.S.-brokered peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, the militant group announced earlier this month it would dissolve its governing administration in the Gaza Strip, ceding formal administrative control to a U.S.-backed Palestinian national committee. While this announcement marks a historic shift in Hamas’s formal role in governing Gaza, analysts have been quick to emphasize that the change does not mandate the dissolution or disarmament of the group’s powerful military wing. Many observers warn the move may ultimately be a largely symbolic rebranding effort, noting that a genuine transfer of full security and governing authority would require dismantling Hamas’s entrenched security apparatus. Still, the development has sparked urgent regional speculation: following Hamas’s step back from formal governance in Gaza, will allied group Hezbollah face similar pressure to recalibrate its role in neighboring Lebanon?

Hezbollah has stood alongside Hamas as a core partner in Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” since the outbreak of Israel’s full-scale military campaign in Gaza. Like Hamas, Hezbollah has sustained heavy losses to its leadership ranks and military infrastructure amid months of cross-border clashes, but unlike some fragmented militant factions, it has retained its core organizational structure and operational military capacity. A fragile 2024 ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel collapsed earlier this year following the outbreak of open hostilities between the U.S.-Israeli coalition and Iran. Just last month, Israel and the Lebanese government signed a new ceasefire deal — negotiated without Hezbollah’s participation — that explicitly requires the group to fully disarm. Hezbollah’s leadership has publicly rejected the demand, vowing to continue armed resistance until all Israeli forces withdraw from Lebanese territory.

Amid mounting regional and domestic pressure, Hezbollah now faces an urgent need to reevaluate its dual role as a political actor in Lebanon’s government and an armed militant proxy for Iran. The group has long navigated a fragile balance between its political legitimacy within Lebanon, its regional military activism, and its strategic alliance with Tehran. Three distinct scenarios could play out as the group navigates this turning point.

First, Hezbollah could choose to fully transform into a purely domestic political party, abandoning its armed wing entirely. Proponents of this path argue it would grant the group renewed regional legitimacy, particularly improving strained ties with Gulf Arab states. But the shift would require a fundamental rewrite of the group’s ideological identity: Hezbollah emerged as an armed militia in the 1980s explicitly to oust Israeli occupying forces from southern Lebanon, and it has remained deeply dependent on Iranian military, political and financial support for decades. For Hezbollah’s core base of supporters, ongoing Israeli military incursions into Lebanese territory continue to justify the group’s armed status. A full transition to civilian politics would also force the group to give up its long-held strategic position as an outsider critic of Lebanon’s corrupt government, requiring it to take formal accountability for policy outcomes — a role it has never prepared to fill. For these reasons, a full disarmament and political transition is widely seen as unlikely in the short term.

A second, more moderate path would see Hezbollah retain its military wing but rebrand it as a national defense force tasked with deterring future Israeli aggression, framing the armed apparatus as a necessary complement to Lebanon’s weak national army. This narrative has resonated with Lebanese nationalist audiences in the past, but shifting public opinion has made this strategy far riskier today. Hezbollah’s domestic popularity has plummeted in recent years, as many Lebanese blame the group for drawing the country into repeated devastating conflicts that have wrecked the already fragile national economy. A growing share of the Lebanese public, including some members of the group’s core Shiite support base, now accuse Hezbollah of prioritizing Iran’s regional geopolitical agenda over Lebanon’s national interest. If this erosion of public support continues, and the group loses the ability to deliver critical social and financial support to its base that has long cemented loyalty, disarmament pressure could emerge from within Lebanese society itself, rather than only from the U.S. and international community.

The third and most volatile scenario is a collapse of the current Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire, leading to a resumption of full-scale open conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. A return to war could be triggered by escalating regional tensions between the U.S. and Iran, Hezbollah’s ongoing rejection of the existing ceasefire terms, or its continued refusal to disarm. While the U.S. and Israel have exerted intense pressure on Lebanon’s weak central government to forcibly disarm Hezbollah, the threat of triggering a devastating new Lebanese civil war has so far prevented the Lebanese army from taking direct military action against the group.

Ultimately, Hezbollah’s future will be shaped less by domestic pressure alone than by its core patron: Iran. Though Hezbollah has long sought to project an image of semi-autonomy from Tehran, the group’s strategic relevance is closely tied to Iran’s regional defense architecture. For the foreseeable future, Hezbollah remains a critical asset for Iran’s projection of power in the Middle East, and until that calculation changes in Tehran, Hezbollah is unlikely to abandon its armed role or alter its current status dramatically.