The Saada compound was a known detention facility. It had been operating as such for years before 28 April. The International Committee of the Red Cross had visited. The United Nations had visited and denied that the compound served any military function. The two buildings hit by American bombs were each about 120 feet long and stood roughly 500 feet apart, separated by a road. The compound occupied 50 acres, surrounded by a wall, in an open area far from any military base. A local Ethiopian activist told The Washington Post that at least three strikes hit the building in long succession while a fourth landed nearby. Another nearby building of unknown use was also struck, though no casualties were reported. The ambulance stationed at the facility was destroyed in the strikes, along with the main gate, hindering rescue.

In early 2024, the United States began an airstrike campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen in response to their attacks on commercial shipping and naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Houthis said their attacks were in support of Palestine during the Gaza War. On 15 March 2025, the U.S. launched Operation Rough Rider, an intensification of that campaign that shifted targeting from Houthi military infrastructure to the group's leadership. U.S. Central Command claimed the operation had destroyed command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, weapons manufacturing sites, and storage locations. The watchdog organization Airwars warned that the shift was putting civilians at greater risk. Whether the Saada facility was targeted deliberately, misidentified, or struck by accident remains disputed. A U.S. Department of Defense official said only that CENTCOM was 'aware of the claims of civilian casualties' and took them 'very seriously.'

The people killed in the Saada detention centre were African migrants, most of them Ethiopians and a smaller number from other Horn of Africa countries. They had traveled through Djibouti or Somaliland, boarded small boats across the Gulf of Aden, walked across northern Yemen, and been captured and detained by Houthi authorities, who reportedly ran the facility as both a control measure and a source of ransom revenue. Many had families in villages outside Addis Ababa or Dire Dawa who were waiting for remittances that would now never come. Three days before the strike, a group of Somali detainees had been removed from the centre for reasons that remain unclear, which meant, a local community leader said, that the number of Somalis killed was 'very small.' The rest of the people locked in the facility were not so fortunate. Al Masirah aired footage of first responders pulling at least a dozen bodies from the wreckage, recovering them from under concrete and twisted metal in what had been a room full of sleeping people.

The United Nations response was explicit. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the attack 'deeply alarming' and urged all parties to protect civilians; he did not name the United States, a diplomatic restraint that Western diplomats noted with some discomfort. The UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, called for 'accountability for every loss of civilian life.' Christine Cipolla, who heads the Red Cross delegation in Yemen, said: 'It is unthinkable that while people are detained and have nowhere to escape, they can also be caught in the line of fire.' Amnesty International called for the strike to be investigated as a possible war crime. By October 2025, reporting from The Intercept put the toll at 61 immigrants and no combatants. The strike was among the most deadly to civilians in the history of United States operations against the Houthis, and it became a touchstone in debates over the targeting policies of Operation Rough Rider.

The route across the Gulf of Aden and through Yemen to Saudi Arabia is one of the most dangerous migration corridors in the world. Tens of thousands of East Africans, many of them Ethiopian teenagers and young adults from Tigray, Oromia, Amhara, and Somalia, undertake the journey every year, paying smugglers for passage and then often being captured, beaten, ransomed, and held in improvised prisons in northern Yemen. A UN report from 2024 estimated that as many as 3,000 migrants had died or gone missing on this route in the preceding two years. The people in the Saada detention centre had not chosen to be there. They were there because migration networks had failed them, and because the Yemeni war had made the already dangerous route through Houthi territory deadlier. On 28 April 2025, for the people inside that compound, the deadliest thing in northern Yemen turned out to be an American GBU-39. They were sleeping when it arrived.