David Bell

But he was also the architect of what the international community was openly calling a humanitarian catastrophe and potentially an act of genocide.

A 2021 report by Muatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni human rights organization, concluded that by November of 2015, the kingdom was aware of a food insecurity crisis in the regions they were striking.

Over the next two years, MBS's Saudi-led coalition increasingly and purposefully used hunger as a weapon to try and force Houthi surrender.

Martha Mundi, an expert on Yemen, quotes a senior Saudi diplomat who described the coalition's strategy this way, "'Once we control them, we will feed them.'"

Huh.

Huh.

Is that the plan, huh?

Yeah.

Okay.

I don't think that's a good plan.

Like, just logistically.

You know you're the bad guys, right?

Yeah.

Like, first off, that's bad guy talk.

That's super villain, yes.

I want to continue by quoting from a 2025 article in the Journal for Genocide Research, Unnoticing Yemen.

A UN panel of experts similarly determined in a report published in January 2018 that the Saudi blockade is essentially using the threat of starvation as a bargaining tool and an instrument of war.

The Yemen Data Project, a major source of information about Yemen, has documented the persistence of the tendency of the Saudi coalition to target civilian places and infrastructure.

Almost a third of all coalition airstrikes throughout the war have been aimed at such targets, especially at farms.

So they are food as a weapon.