Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement escalated attacks on Saudi Arabia and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces this week, its most damaging offensive since a 2022 truce. A Houthi attack on Thursday wounded 11 civilians in Saudi Arabia’s Najran province, including a four-year-old child, and Houthi strikes hours earlier on government camps in Marib and Hadramout killed at least 30 troops and wounded at least 50 others, Yemeni officials told the Associated Press, though the Houthis claimed higher, unverified casualties.
Reuters reported that the Houthis claimed missile attacks on Saudi oil tankers, though Riyadh has not confirmed the strikes, and that six Saudi-flagged supertankers have rerouted around southern Africa to avoid Bab el-Mandeb. A senior Saudi official told Reuters that intelligence pointed to possible coordinated attacks by Iran-backed forces in Yemen and Iraq under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an assessment not independently corroborated. The rerouting shows Iran’s Houthi allies can impose real costs on Red Sea shipping without deploying a conventional navy. Reuters has described the Houthi campaign as opening a new front against the United States and its allies within the broader Iran-U.S. war, an indication that Tehran’s regional proxies retain the capacity to project pressure even as that conflict continues.
