Phones across Riyadh lit up on Thursday with an alert telling residents the capital faced a “hostile aerial threat”. Shortly afterwards, journalists from the French news agency counted no fewer than eight loud bangs. Najran in the south and the town of Kharj received similar civil defence alerts, which were lifted after a short time.
Turki al-Malki, the spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, said in a post on X that air defences had destroyed two ballistic missiles fired toward Riyadh by the Houthi movement. He gave no details about any damage on the ground.
In Yemen, the Iran-aligned Houthis described a grim toll from Saudi air raids. According to the group’s health officials, a raid that destroyed two family houses in the village of Al-Barah (Maqbana district) left a dozen dead, and three more people are fighting for their lives. Counting Al-Jawf and Taiz provinces together, the group put the death toll for less than 24 hours at 27, with 18 wounded. It had already reported 14 deaths on Wednesday after a fuel station and a market were hit. None of these figures can be checked independently.
The fighting has escalated step by step since July, when the 2022 truce collapsed after the Houthis let an Iranian aircraft land in Sanaa. The group then proclaimed a sea blockade of the kingdom, went after Saudi ships and oil sites, and captured Yemen’s whole Red Sea coastline. An earlier assault on Riyadh’s airport kept it closed for a fortnight and forced the cancellation of major events.
The UN counts upward of 1,600 dead in Yemen since the war flared up again, and more than 275,000 people have had to flee. The latest exchange came only days after senior Saudi and Iranian officials met in Tehran and pledged to settle regional disputes through talks.
