Execution of survivors under Hegseth’s ‘kill everybody’ order labeled a war crime

U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to leave no survivors behind as Donald Trump’s administration launched the first of more than a dozen attacks on alleged drug-running boats that have killed more than 80 people over the last three months, according to The Independent.

On September 2, U.S. military personnel fired a missile, striking a vessel in the Caribbean that carried 11 people accused of trafficking drugs into the United States.

When two survivors emerged from the wreckage, a Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions to “kill everybody,” according to The Washington Post, citing officials with direct knowledge of the operation.

The two men were then “blown apart in the water,” according to the report.

News of Hegseth’s alleged command follows intense legal scrutiny from international investigators and members of Congress alleging that the Trump administration’s deadly campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, which law-of-war experts speaking to The Independent have labeled outright murder and a war crime.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told The Washington Post that the newspaper’s “entire narrative is completely false” and that “ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.”

In a statement on Friday evening, Hegseth criticized what he called “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting,” but he did not refute the claims.

In September, the Trump administration told Congress that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants.”

Administration officials have labeled cartels “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and are now engaged in a “noninternational armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor.

In the weeks that followed, the Trump administration directed more than a dozen strikes that have killed more than 80 people on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, but have not publicly provided any evidence or legal justification for their deaths, according to lawmakers and civil rights groups.