The War Department delivered its unreleased annual report on civilian casualties to members of Congress on Tuesday, but two government officials blasted the it, with one calling the report “a ... joke,” following a harsh expletive.
The “1057 report,” which covers allegations of civilian harm stemming from military attacks in Iran, Somalia, Yemen, and the campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, found that U.S. attacks likely killed or wounded hundreds of civilians. Still, officials say it severely undercounted the carnage, with one deeming the report, a “total whitewash.”
It’s the latest in a series of recent Pentagon reports that have called attention to U.S. failures to prevent, mitigate, or adequately track civilian harm after self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation and response or CHMR programs.
“Shockingly, the Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in [President Donald Trump’s] campaign of boat strikes, according to the officials, despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder,” reports the Intercept. “The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were ‘narcoterrorists.’ In a classified briefing last fall, a high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that some of the people killed in the initial September 2, 2025, attack may have been the victims of human trafficking, according to an Intercept investigation.”
“They have absolutely no credibility,” the second official told The Intercept about the boat strike claims, adding that the report was “sickening.”
The Intercept reports the 1057 release determined that only three incidents “likely” harmed civilians, according to the second official, with another 15 attacks still under review, he said.
“The idea CENTCOM still has fifteen cases on Yemen to adjudicate doesn’t bode well for the war in Iran,” said the first official.
The report also does not cover Trump’s ongoing failed war on Iran, which Trump coordinated with Israel in February, because it includes only military attacks from 2025. The second government official said that the number of incidents of civilian harm to investigate from the current war with Iran will dwarf the number in Yemen.
Reports of civilian injury were recorded every day from the beginning of the war on February 28 to the first ceasefire on April 8, according to the U.K.-based air strike monitoring group, Airwars. The World Health organization put the death toll in Iran at 3,375 people — before the ceasefire crumbled last month. The second official said the backlog of war dead in Iran would likely carry over several years, referencing the fact that the 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to just one individual.
“How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” one official told the Intercept.