Saudi Arabia intercepted two ballistic missiles fired at the kingdom by Yemen’s armed Houthi militias on Wednesday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV reported.
The attack follows renewed air strikes by a Saudi-led military coalition on the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Thirteen civilians were killed when bombs a snack food factory.
The Iran-backed Houthis did not immediately claim responsibility for the missile attack. In the past, they have boasted of launching around a dozen Scud missiles at the south of the kingdom during more than a year of war.
Earlier this month, Houthi militias have launched a volley of Katyusha rockets on 4 August at a Saudi National Guard base in the kingdom’s southern Jizan region.
According to reports, a Saudi tank and several armed vehicles were destroyed in the attack.
On 3 August, two Saudi soldiers were killed in a series of retaliatory attacks by Houthi milita in Jizan, while on 2 August, artillery fire launched from Yemen killed four people and injured three more in the border region.
Earlier, seven Saudi soldiers were killed during clashes with Houthi militia — close to the kingdom’s southwestern border region of Najran. Houthi fighters routinely clash with Saudi border guards both along the frontier and inside the Saudi territory.
A senior Houthi official did say that he held the United Nations responsible for the stepped-up combat, which followed the collapse over the weekend of U.N.-backed peace talks.
“The silence of the U.N. towards this dangerous escalation and mass extermination against the Yemeni people … makes it a partner in the aggression,” Saleh al-Samad, the chief of a new Houthi-backed political council, told state news agency Saba.
Yemen has been wracked by chaos since late 2014, when the Houthis and their allies overran Sanaa and other parts of the country, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and his Saudi-backed government to temporarily flee to Riyadh. Saudi soldiers
The Saudi-led coalition began a military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi militias in March 2015. It sides with the President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, while the Houthis are aligned with ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted after Yemen revolution in 2012. Saudi Arabia
