Thirty-one journalists from two government-run newspapers were killed, along with four others, including a child.
Israel’s airstrikes on a media complex in Yemen last week resulted in the largest single attack on journalists the world has seen in 16 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In a report released Friday, the group said that 31 journalists from two government-run newspapers based in Sana’a were killed in the strikes on September 10, along with four others, including one child.
Nasser Al-Khadri, editor-in-chief of the newspaper 26 September, called the attack on his newsroom an “unprecedented massacre of journalists.”
“It is a brutal and unjustified attack that targeted innocent people whose only crime was working in the media field, armed with nothing but their pens and words,” Al-Khadri told the CPJ.
According to CPJ, it was the second-largest attack on the press they’ve ever recorded, and the worst since 2009, when 32 journalists were massacred as part of a political ambush in the Philippines.
The Israeli government has often defended its attacks on civilian infrastructure by claiming that it houses militants. But in these strikes, the IDF’s media desk acknowledged that it was targeting what it referred to as the “Public Relations Department” for the Houthis, also known as Ansar-Allah.
Shortly after Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza began in 2023, the militant group, which controls large parts of Yemen, began to launch drone and missile strikes against shipping vessels in the Red Sea and directly against Israel in what they have described as an effort to support Palestinians under fire.
