BBC ignores funeral of 31 Yemeni journalists murdered by Israel

The BBC has ignored the funeral of 31 journalists murdered by Israel in a double-bombing attack on media offices in Yemen last week in what was the biggest slaughter of journalists in a single day in history.

Exactly a week ago, Israel bombed the headquarters of the Al-Yemen and 26 September newspapers in Sana’a. The deliberate strike killed Yemeni journalists who reported on Yemen’s actions against Israel. Ansar Allah have committed to every global government’s obligations under international law to end or prevent the genocide in Gaza.

Author Assal Rad noted that the media’s reaction would have been very different had the victims been Ukrainian and the perpetrator Russia:

The BBC News channel appears not to have mentioned the funeral at all. The BBC usually covers itself in such omissions by tucking a mention away on the BBC News website. However, a search of the BBC website returns no results at all.

Well, not quite zero – there was a single mention of a Yemeni journalist’s funeral – from 1999:

‘Israeli strikes in Yemen kill 35 people, Houthis say’

The BBC did mention the murder of the journalists last week – kind of. In a single article on its news site, the BBC said that “At least 35 people were killed in Israeli air strikes” and threw in that two newspaper offices “were hit.” It’s almost as if it just happened spontaneously or was incidental – if it happened at all, because it was only “the Houthis’ military spokesman” who said it:

the Houthis’ military spokesman said the targets were civilian, adding that journalists and passersby were killed when the offices of two newspapers were hit.

No mention of the clearly targeted strikes then or since.

The BBC, full of journalists – or at least NUJ members – has been appalling throughout Israel’s slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian journalists in Gaza – almost certainly with the assistance of the Starmer government – either ignoring it completely or regurgitating easily-debunked Israeli propaganda that the killings were accidental or its victims were terrorists.

But 31 journalists in one day, in two targeted strikes on media offices are indisputably intended specifically to kill journalists – on a historic and shameful scale – and an unequivocal war crime. In the absence of any way to spin the murders for Israel, the BBC seems to have opted to simply ignore it completely.

Featured image via the Canary