50 civilians, including pregnant women, have been killed by the latest Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or Drone strikes in Ethiopia’s Amhara region on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, BBC Amharic reported.
Eyewitnesses told BBC Amharic that three consecutive drone strikes massacred innocent people aged from child to elder in South Achefer Wereda (district), North Gojjam Zone of the Amhara regional state.
The drone strikes killed people who were playing volleyball, elders at the mission of mediation, women at medical care, laborers, and people who were around the church and farming.
According to the eyewitnesses, drone strikes targeted churches, schools, and health care centers. They expressed the attack as “terrible” that challenged them to hate “being human,” and said they had “never seen when man did such cruelty to humans.”
Similarly, the Ethiopian government forces reportedly carried out a drone strike near Debre Berhan City, North Shewa of the Amhara region last Monday.
Earlier this month, on October 16, 2024, drone strikes reportedly killed several civilians surrounding Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara regional state, and other areas in Gojjam and the North Shewa Zones (provinces) of the region.
Multiple Drone strikes killed civilians in Ethiopia’s Amhara region
A renewed fight started at the beginning of last month, following the ENDF’s announcement of a “decisive offensive” against Fano militias on October 1, 2024.
According to the recent report of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the use of drones by the ENDF/Ethiopian Air Force caused 248 civilian deaths with 18 registered drone strikes in the region just between 4 August and 31 December 2023.
594 incidents of human rights violations and abuses impacting 8,253 victims have been registered in Ethiopia, whereby the state actors are responsible for 70 percent of the violations, the report indicates.
OHCHR has also underscored that the situation in the Amhara region is “concerning” with a total of 740 civilian deaths recorded in 2023 alone, “most of which were attributed to the government security forces”.
On Wednesday, Amnesty International called for an end to the month-long detention of thousands in the Amhara Region, accusing the regime’s troops for arbitrarily jailing civilians in makeshift detention camps, calling it a “routine tactic”.
“Ethiopia has entered a new era of disregard for national, regional and international human rights obligations,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa.
