Legal experts have raised concerns US forces may have committed a war crime by killing survivors of initial strike

The Pentagon will not make public the full video of a September attack in the Caribbean that killed two individuals as they were clinging to the wreckage of a burning boat, Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday.

The strike has been the most controversial development in Donald Trump’s campaign against Venezuela, which has seen US forces blow up vessels alleged to be transporting narcotics from the South American country to the United States, seize an oil tanker and threaten further military action against the president, Nicolás Maduro.

Legal experts have raised concerns that US forces may have committed a war crime by killing the survivors of an initial air strike on 2 September, and that the campaign is illegal. Democrats have called for the release of video detailing that attack, and Trump at one point supported making the footage public but later backtracked and deferred to Hegseth.