Yemen's Houthi movement fired missiles at Riyadh's international airport on Saturday, with witnesses describing an explosion and casualties inside a terminal, according to The Guardian. Saudi officials have not confirmed the strike or any evacuation, the newspaper reported.
One witness told Agence France-Presse he was waiting at gate 403 in the domestic terminal when he saw gate 401 struck. "I saw injured in front of my eyes. Everyone was running," he said, as quoted by The Guardian.
A hospital source told AFP that five wounded people were in intensive care and that dozens more had been hurt. A relative of one victim said the person suffered injuries to the shoulders and arms from broken glass and was taken to a hospital, The Guardian reported.
Why it matters
The strike lands at the heart of Saudi Arabia's capital and extends a week of escalating Houthi missile attacks on the kingdom. King Khalid International Airport had already been hit twice in the days before Saturday's incident, leaving four people dead and others wounded, and causing serious damage to an aircraft, according to The Guardian. The airport is a major gateway for the kingdom, and repeated strikes on it raise questions about the reach of Houthi firepower and the ability of Saudi air defenses to stop it.
The timing also matters beyond Saudi Arabia's borders. The attack came as forces aligned with Yemen's UN-recognized government claimed a breakthrough against the Houthis at the Bab al-Mandab strait, a chokepoint on the route between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The competing accounts of that offensive — and the airport strike itself — point to a war that has returned to full intensity.
Conflicting accounts over Bab al-Mandab
The Houthis seized the strait two weeks ago and said no commercial traffic tied to Saudi Arabia would be allowed through the narrow waterway, The Guardian reported. Houthi forces have been fighting to push Saudi influence out of Yemen and have launched missile attacks on Riyadh in support of that goal.
On Saturday, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed al-Jaber, said the strait had been cleared. "Blessed Friday and victory for every Yemeni and Arab. Bab al-Mandab has been cleared of the remnants of the Houthi terrorist militia," he said, according to The Guardian.
Aidarous al-Zubaidi, president of the Southern Transitional Council, one of the main political forces in southern Yemen, also claimed that Perim Island and the surrounding coastal area had been retaken from the Houthis. The island, about 5 square miles, sits in the middle of the strait and serves as a lookout point for vessels moving from the Red Sea toward the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Those claims were qualified by a military spokesperson for the UN-recognized government's forces, who said only half of the area had been recaptured so far. Waddah al-Dabish said newly established Houthi defensive lines on the land next to the strait had been broken, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Houthi fighters, according to The Guardian.
The Guardian reported that as many as 500 Houthi fighters are believed to be stationed on the island, and that Saudi Arabia is eager to announce the strait's recapture as evidence that the ground counteroffensive it began earlier in the week is making progress. The newspaper noted there have been previous premature reports of military breakthroughs by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government since that counteroffensive started.
A war back at full scale
The United Nations' special envoy to Yemen, Hans Grundberg, told the UN Security Council in New York that Yemen — described by The Guardian as the poorest country in the world — had returned to full-scale war. He said the first victims would be women and children.
The truce in the long-running conflict between the Houthis and Yemen's Riyadh-backed government collapsed in July. Since then, the Houthis have repeatedly targeted Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers, The Guardian reported. The Houthis are aligned with Iran, which Saudi Arabia and its allies view as a regional rival.
Saturday's reported strike fits that pattern. The Guardian reported that a source at a local hospital described five people in intensive care and dozens more injured, while Saudi authorities have yet to confirm any new attack or evacuation. The discrepancy between witness accounts and official silence is itself notable: no Saudi statement has verified the scale of the casualties or the damage.
What happens next will likely be shaped by two things: whether Saudi Arabia confirms the attack and how it responds, and whether the Saudi-backed counteroffensive near Bab al-Mandab holds the ground it claims to have taken. Both remain unresolved.
