Trump administration officials are slamming their colleagues in the Pentagon after a new report downplayed casualty counts from recent military strikes, per a new report.
The Department of Defense turned over an annual report to Congress with a tally of civilian casualties from military strikes in 2025, and one anonymous Trump administration official called it “a f—— joke,” according to reporting by The Intercept.
The report addresses allegations of civilian harm during 2025 military attacks in Somalia and Yemen, as well as boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, where the Pentagon insists it’s fighting drug trafficking, The Intercept reported.
However, the report asserts that U.S. attacks killed no civilians during military boat strikes, despite reports that those strikes killed more than 120 civilians, according to The Intercept. A second Trump administration official called the report “a total whitewash” and “sickening,” adding that the Pentagon has “absolutely no credibility.”
The Intercept noted that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation and response programs in the Pentagon. Although the report, which has only been released to Congress but not to the public, denied civilian deaths from the boat strikes, it found that U.S. attacks in the Middle East likely killed or wounded hundreds of civilians, The Intercept reported.
However, the second official said that the report offered “lowball numbers” for civilian casualties from U.S. attacks in Yemen. The report estimated U.S. air and naval strikes in Yemen killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250, but the Yemen Data Project estimated that 238 civilians were killed and 467 were injured by U.S. attacks.
Both anonymous officials also pointed out that the Pentagon is still reviewing 15 cases of attacks on civilians in Yemen and that the 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to one person. The first official said it “doesn’t bode well for the war in Iran,” adding, “How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished in Yemen?”
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