Fighting in and around Yemen has displaced around 130,000 people in recent weeks and caused 110 casualties, including 28 deaths, according to reports cited in an open letter to the British government. Its signatories warn that Britain's decision to refuel Saudi fighter jets could make the United Kingdom complicit in further violations of international law.
The letter is addressed to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband. Its authors said they were "deeply concerned" about the decision to refuel Royal Saudi Air Force aircraft as hostilities escalated. "There is a real risk that further UK military support for Saudi Arabia will not achieve the desired outcome and could make the UK complicit in further war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law," they wrote.
Who Is Asking
The signatories include the Campaign Against Arms Trade, Action on Armed Violence, Shadow World Investigations UK and the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. Academics and specialists in international relations, human rights and international law also signed the letter. They come from the universities of Oxford, Bristol, Westminster, Sussex, King's College London, Warwick, Royal Holloway and Northumbria.
The letter describes British support for Saudi military action in Yemen as longstanding. That action began in 2015, 11 years ago, and initially involved a coalition of Arab states.
The Civilian Toll
The numbers in the letter are stark. The Yemen Data Project recorded 25,054 Saudi-led coalition air raids between 2015 and 2022. The organisations said extensive evidence showed the air campaign targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. They said the war also involved an air and sea blockade, economic collapse and ground fighting.
The letter cited a United Nations Development Programme estimate that the conflict had killed 377,000 people, directly and indirectly, by the end of 2021. It also referred to allegations that the Saudi-led coalition used starvation as a weapon.
The signatories pointed to what they see as a strategic failure. The Saudi-led intervention, they said, hadn't defeated or dislodged the Houthis, who still control most of Yemen's population.
The letter also criticised Britain's role in U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis in spring 2025, which the UK reportedly supported with refuelling. It cited a Pentagon assessment that the strikes between March and May 2025 "more likely than not" caused 281 civilian casualties.
A Wider Regional Crisis
The letter doesn't treat Yemen in isolation. It attributes the latest escalation to developments inside Yemen, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the war in Gaza. The signatories also raised concerns about Houthi attacks and attempted attacks on civilian infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.
"Past experience has shown that air strikes will not contribute to defeating the Houthis or alleviating pressure on Saudi Arabia or on global shipping routes," the signatories wrote. "Instead, the UK is only further fuelling the war and is risking complicity in further crimes."
The Diplomatic Alternative
The groups want London to step back from the military track. "In light of Saudi Arabia's extensive record of violations in Yemen, we urge your government not to involve itself in Saudi operations and focus on de-escalatory diplomacy," they wrote.
The organisations argued that diplomacy, not further military support, offers a route towards peace in Yemen. They said de-escalation could also help reduce the wider economic consequences of the region's interconnected wars.
Why This Matters: The letter puts a hard question to a Western government: what responsibility does it carry when its military support feeds a war with a documented civilian toll? The figures it cites—130,000 displaced in recent weeks, 377,000 dead by the end of 2021 and 281 likely civilian casualties from the 2025 strikes—show what's at stake for civilians. From a human rights perspective, the signatories argue that international humanitarian law means little if allies keep supplying the means to break it. Their call for diplomacy also reflects a wider concern: separate regional wars, from Yemen to Iran to Gaza, are now feeding one another, and military escalation by outside powers makes negotiated settlements harder to reach. The letter cites 130,000 people displaced in recent weeks.