Rights Report: Houthis Accused of Killing 33 Academics and Wounding 98 Over a Decade
Yemen Monitor / Newsroom:
Rights Radar for Human Rights, based in the Netherlands, has revealed a shocking toll of violations against Yemeni academics between 2014 and 2024, stating that universities have been transformed from centers of knowledge into arenas for eliminating intellectual elites.
According to the report, 33 academics were killed and 98 others injured — including 9 women — across 12 Yemeni governorates. The Houthi group was blamed for the majority of these crimes, which included summary executions, assassinations, arbitrary arrests, torture to death, enforced disappearances, as well as shelling and targeting of residential areas and universities.
The capital Sana’a recorded the highest number of victims, with 11 killings — six attributed to the Houthis, three to airstrikes, and two by unidentified perpetrators.
In Aden, the report documented the killing of six academics, including two female professors shot dead by Houthi snipers during the city’s invasion in 2015.
Other killings were recorded in Hudaidah, Dhamar, Taiz, Saada, and Amran, including the execution of a Palestinian academic at Saada University, whose death the group claimed was caused by COVID-19.
The report further highlighted that four academic died under torture in Houthi prisons, among them professors from Sana’a University who passed away weeks after their release in critical health conditions.
Additionally, 19 academics were assassinated or physically liquidated — nine by the Houthis, three by non-government armed groups, while seven incidents remained unattributed. Meanwhile, eight academics were killed by aerial and artillery bombardments — five in Houthi shelling and three in coalition airstrikes.
The organization stressed that these systematic violations against academic staff pose a grave threat to the future of higher education in Yemen, calling for urgent international intervention to protect universities and their faculty from ongoing targeting.
