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| Different building hit by Saudi airstrikes |
Shelling from Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces hit an international humanitarian aid office in Yemen on Thursday, killing five Ethiopian refugees and wounding 10, a local official said. The news comes amid growing concern about the Saudi-led military offensive's impact on Yemen’s civilians and infrastructure.If you want to know the up-to-date statistics of how many civilians were killed since Saudi Arabia started their airstrikes, good luck. You won't find a scorecard attached to every story about the fighting the way that reporters in Gaza loved to include in their stories.
Also unlike Gaza, when civilians are killed it is assumed that not all of them were killed by the Saudis, while in Gaza all of the people killed were assumed to be from Israeli fire, even though well over a thousand Hamas rockets fell in civilian areas.
In fact, while reporters flocked to cover the Gaza war, secure in the knowledge that Israel wouldn't bomb the areas where they stayed, no reporters are trying to sneak into Yemen to file first-person reports. With rare exceptions, reporters aren't even trying to do anything original in their reporting.
The Gaza reporters happily accepted the Hamas talking points as fact, but no one (outside of Iranian media) is viewing the Houthi version of the story from Yemen as having any legitimacy.
Another point that is roundly ignored by the media is that the Saudis are relying on US intelligence when they choose their targets. NGOs that eagerly asserted with no evidence that Israel was engaging in indiscriminate bombing in Gaza based on civilians being killed are not pointing their fingers at any failure of US intel.
The double standards are clear to anyone who cares to look. Which doesn't, of course, include the media.