By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

The reckless Saudi-led, U.S.-backed war on Yemen has so far killed at least 10,000 civilians, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The United Nations says food shortages, medical shortages, destroyed hospitals, and hasty burials have conspired with mass internal displacement to make tracking casualties all but impossible.
Just a week after the UN human rights office reported 3,799 civilians killed over the course of the war, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick, told a news conference the overall toll is in excess of 10,000.
With many areas turned into war zones, there aren’t reliable records on casualties, and with millions displaced within the country and some 200,000 having fled abroad, it’s often impossible to tell who was killed and who simply fled elsewhere.
All these factors are likely to mean we never fully know the death toll of this war, but UN officials see ample reason to believe it’s on the high end, and with more than half of the population reliant on food aid which isn’t always quick in being delivered, there is always a risk of the toll getting precipitously worse.
The reason is simple: The Saudi-led coalition maintains that "lawful targets allegedly shielded with protected civilians may be attacked, and the protected civilians may be considered as collateral damage, provided that the collateral damage is not excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.
They say this to justify targeting civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and markets. What’s more, the so-called collateral damage is excessive compared to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.
What all this means, quite simply, is that they target everything and everyone even if the deployment of violence does breach the principle of proportionality - which requires the belligerent regime changers to refrain from causing damage disproportionate to the military advantage to be gained.
The motivation behind the adoption of such guidelines by the regime changers is clear:  it allows their occupying forces to relax the rules of engagement, while framing those who are defending the people of Yemen as morally deplorable and in breach of international law.  
Put differently, if any one of Yemen’s 10,000 civilians is killed during a Saudi-led airstrike, then it is not the U.S.-backed attacking forces that are to blame, but rather the resistance fighters, who allegedly used civilians as shields. Moreover, it increasingly appears that it is enough to claim - in advance - that the resistance movement of Ansarullah is using human shields in order to warrant the killing of non-combatants.
Whatever this is, the potential ramifications of the mere accusation are extremely worrisome. By claiming that the resistance fighters are using human shields, the Saudi-led attacking forces provide themselves with a preemptive legal defense, which is criminal and unjustified under international law and the principle of proportionality.
It is past time for the international community to make it absolutely clear to Saudi Arabia and its criminal coalition that their war on Yemen is illegal under international law and UN protocols. They have no right whatsoever to kill civilians in Yemen under any pretext. They also have no right to deny responsibility for their crimes against humanity in the poorest nation in the Middle East.