A four-year truce between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen was in peril on Monday as each party accused the other of launching an attack.
The escalating tensions threatened to open a new front in the Middle East, where the U.S.-Israel war with Iran has spilled across the region over the past few months but has largely bypassed Yemen.
The Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing Yemen’s main international airport on Monday. That attack appeared to be an attempt to prevent an Iranian plane from landing in the Houthi-controlled capital of Yemen, Sana. The Saudi government did not comment on the Houthis’ claims.
After the bombing, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles toward Saudi Arabia, a Saudi military coalition said. The coalition statement said that Saudi air defenses had “dealt with” that threat.
A Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said that the militia had targeted an airport in Abha, Saudi Arabia, and issued a warning to airlines to stay away from Saudi airspace.
Hans Grundberg, the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, said he was “deeply concerned about the risk of wider escalation.” He added that he was in touch with the parties involved.
“We are urging them to de-escalate and refrain from any actions that would risk a new cycle of violence in Yemen,” he said.
A Saudi-led military coalition had been mired in a brutal war with the Houthis for nearly a decade, until a truce was agreed upon in 2022. The fragile peace that took hold had appeared to be increasingly durable as years passed, and it initially withstood the regional tensions ignited by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran this year.
While the Houthis launched a handful of attacks on Israel, they did not target Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. But tensions between the Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed government started to spike after an Iranian plane landed in Sana’s airport on July 3 ahead of funeral proceedings in Iran for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the slain supreme leader.
At the time, Mr. Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said that Saudi fighter jets had entered Yemen and tried to prevent the plane from landing. He said that the Iranian aircraft was a civilian plane that was bringing Yemeni medical patients home from Tehran, and that when it took off again, it was carrying a large Houthi delegation to Tehran to participate in the state funeral.
It was not immediately clear why Saudi Arabia might have objected to the Iranian plane landing in Sana. But Iran in the past has supplied the Houthis with weaponry and military training.
The Saudi-led military coalition has for years enforced a punishing blockade over Yemeni airspace, and flights to and from Yemen remain restricted.
Earlier this month, Mr. Saree warned Saudi Arabia that any violation of Yemeni airspace could prompt a Houthi attack on Saudi airports and vital interests, and pledged that flights between Sana and Tehran would continue “regardless of the consequences.”
Then, on July 4, Yemen’s government issued a statement saying that the “Iranian regime’s operation of a direct flight” to Sana had been “a flagrant violation” of Yemen’s sovereignty.
The same day, a Saudi-led military coalition said that the Houthi militia’s allegations were “nothing but an attempt to divert attention from its grave violations against the brotherly Yemeni people.” The coalition did not mention the Iranian plane, but said that it would respond harshly to any attempts to violate Yemen’s sovereignty.
Those tensions came to a head on Monday with the attack on Sana airport.
Yemen’s Saudi-backed government claimed the attack, saying that it had carried it out in order to prevent another Iranian plane from landing there. However the Yemeni government does not have a functional air force, and relies heavily on military support from Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Saree squarely blamed Saudi Arabia for the attack, and warned in a statement that it signified the end of a “de-escalation phase” between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.
Iran’s state broadcaster later said that an Iranian aircraft had successfully landed in Yemen’s Hodeidah airport, near the Red Sea, without providing details.
Yemen’s grinding civil war began in 2014, when the Houthis swept into Sana and ousted the country’s internationally recognized government, forcing its officials to flee to the southern city of Aden. The next year, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began a bombing campaign in an attempt to restore the government.
That campaign failed to displace the Houthis, and Saudi Arabia eventually pulled back from Yemen. The Houthis have since cemented their control of the country’s north, effectively dividing Yemen into two states.
While the internationally recognized government is nominally based in Aden, many of its most senior officials are actually based in Saudi Arabia, and they depend on the kingdom, both financially and politically. Yemen, a deeply impoverished country, is mired in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, which was exacerbated by the fighting.
In recent days, ground clashes have broken out between the Yemeni government and Houthi forces in the province of Hodeidah, threatening to reignite the war.
Mohammed Abdulsalam, a Houthi spokesman, on Monday called the attack on Sana’s airport “a major breach of the 2022 truce.” He accused Saudi Arabia in a statement of delaying and rejecting solutions to resume operations at the airport, which had been halted for much of the war under a blockade by the Saudi-led coalition.
Mr. Grundberg, the U.N. envoy, said his priority was to prevent any further deterioration at this sensitive moment.
“Any step that risks widening the confrontation would only deepen Yemen’s suffering and undermine the calm that Yemenis urgently need preserved,” he said.
Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting from al-Mukalla, Yemen, and Ismaeel Naar from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
