Houthis target Taif and Yanbu: coalition destroys two ballistic missiles; Houthis announce seven attacks and report deaths from Saudi strikes

Taif and Yanbu, in western Saudi Arabia, were the targets of the new wave of Houthi attacks on Saturday, October 24. The spokesman of the Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen, Brigadier General Turki al-Maliki, announced shortly after 12:00 Saudi time that two ballistic missiles fired by the “terrorist Houthi militia” toward the two cities were intercepted and destroyed.

It had been a difficult night for the kingdom’s air defences. At 03:35 local time the coalition reported that a drone was shot down over the Eastern Province, where the country’s major oil facilities are located. Shortly before 05:00 another announcement concerned yet another ballistic missile aimed at Riyadh, which was also destroyed. The two incidents came a few hours after Friday’s attacks, when the coalition had announced the destruction of missiles aimed at Riyadh and Khamis Mushait.

Saudi Civil Defense issued warnings for Mecca, Jeddah, Taif and Yanbu, urging residents to take shelter and stay away from windows, according to the Saudi Gazette. Soon afterwards it announced that the danger for the Mecca area and Yanbu had passed. Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast, is the port through which Riyadh exports much of its crude bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, and was targeted by the Houthis on Thursday, October 22 as well, when the group claimed an attack on Aramco facilities.

The Houthi claims

From Sanaa’s side, the Houthis’ Al-Masirah television network recorded a series of Saudi airstrikes during the day. According to its correspondents, a strike on a house in the Asr district of the capital killed four people. A strike on the workers’ residences of a cement factory in the Hamdan district, in Sanaa province, was deadly: eight dead, among them six women and a girl, and more than ten injured. In Hodeidah province, a strike on a house in Tuhayta killed, according to the same network, five members of one family, the father, his two wives and two children. The Houthi media also report about 20 raids on Mokha since the morning. These claims have not been independently verified.

The Houthi armed forces themselves reported strikes inside Yemen. They announced that they targeted force concentrations at the so-called al-Nasr camp and the Aden naval base, claiming that the concentration and its equipment are supervised by Saudi officers under Brigadier General Badr Salah al-Harbi. On Friday their forces had counted 124 Saudi airstrikes and missile strikes within 24 hours and 3,024 in total since the escalation began in July.

On Saturday evening the Houthi armed forces announced seven operations with ballistic missiles and drones inside Saudi Arabia. According to the statement, the targets were King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, “in two phases”, Aramco facilities in Yanbu, the Rabigh refinery, the pumping stations and the crude pipeline that crosses the kingdom from east to west, King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, where the group claims traffic was halted, Najran airport and Khamis Mushait air base. The group presents the attacks as a response to 100 Saudi airstrikes within 24 hours and raises the total since the start of the escalation to 3,123, under the slogan “blockade for blockade, escalation for escalation”.

The confrontation is also spreading to the sea. The Houthi government’s foreign ministry on Saturday warned of the “militarisation” of Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea by Saudi Arabia, while a day earlier the same government’s interior ministry had denounced a Saudi strike on the lighthouse of Perim Island, at the entrance to the strait. The tension already has consequences for foreigners in Saudi Arabia: the US has ordered the departure of non-essential diplomatic personnel from the country.