The Houthis Have Put Hajj and Umrah in Their Sights. Saudi Arabia Will Still Win

The numbers explain the target. According to the Pilgrim Experience Program, Saudi Arabia received more than 19.5 million foreign pilgrims in 2025: about 18 million for Umrah and 1.5 million for Hajj. There is no official figure for what they spend, but estimates put the kingdom’s income from the pilgrimage at around $30 billion a year, and some above $40 billion, with each pilgrim spending somewhere between $3,000 and $10,000, more during Hajj. Under Vision 2030 the kingdom is expanding Mecca and Medina to host 30 million pilgrims a year by the end of the decade. Pilgrimage is not the main source of state revenue, and much of the money is reinvested in the holy cities themselves. That makes it a symbol as much as an income stream.

Hajj and Umrah are also the one thing in Saudi Arabia that never stops. Tourism can collapse and conferences can move online, but Hajj is a religious obligation on every Muslim who is able to perform it, not an optional act of devotion. Pilgrims will keep coming even in wartime, and the next Hajj season, in May 2027, is only seven months away. The Houthi calculation is that the share who stay away will grow with every attack.

The deeper target is legitimacy. The Saudi king’s official title is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Anything that touches Mecca, Medina or the safety of pilgrims strikes at that title. That is why 176 ministers, scholars and muftis from more than 70 countries wrote to condemn the attacks as a threat to the security of the Two Holy Mosques.

The Houthis protest that they pray towards Mecca and would never strike it, and that Mecca and Medina will be spared. Do not believe it. In practice they are already striking the pilgrimage. Their attacks are not aimed at the Kaaba or the Prophet’s Mosque, but they hit airports, and every closed airport hits pilgrims, tourists, business and even embassy traffic. The plan does not require a direct hit on a holy site. A drone or missile that kills worshippers on the edge of Mecca or Medina would be enough: Muslims killing Muslims on their way to prayer, in the hope that rising casualties drive the faithful away. On October 15 the coalition said it had intercepted and destroyed a cruise missile over the Medina region. The Houthis’ military spokesman denied launching any attack on Saudi territory that day. A month earlier, the coalition had reported intercepting a drone heading towards Mecca.

Tehran has reasons to fear this path. An attack that kills pilgrims at the gates of Mecca or Medina would rally Muslims everywhere behind Saudi Arabia and turn a border war into a religious one, and a religious war against the Houthis would eventually find its way to Iran.

Riyadh sees Iran’s hand behind the escalation. Saudi spokesman Ahmed Krimly said the kingdom believes the Houthi escalation is encouraged by Iran, and that Saudi Arabia has not asked Tehran to mediate. Iran’s backing for the Houthis is not in doubt. But a movement under daily, precise bombardment does not always wait for its patron. The Houthis are in so much pain that they will break Iran’s own calculations if they must. They want to hurt the Saudi economy and Saudi Arabia by any means, whatever it costs Tehran.

There is a second danger in this path. If the Muslim world does not rally, and Muslim states tell Riyadh to face the Houthis alone, Saudi Arabia will be pushed in the other direction: deeper into the American alliance and closer to normalisation with Israel. That is the opposite of what Iran wants, and the Houthis are driving Riyadh towards it without seeing where they are pushing. Their contempt for the kingdom runs deep: according to reporting on their internal meetings and leaked intelligence assessments, the Houthis do not recognise the Saudi monarchy or the crown prince’s succession at all. A movement that rejects the state it is fighting is capable of anything.

An analysis in The Atlantic made the point bluntly: Saudi Arabia has failed to contain the Houthis. A few years ago Riyadh never expected to be here, unable to end the war diplomatically and unable to end it militarily, and absorbing strikes almost every day. One of the richest states in the world has found that the conflict will not stay inside Yemen. It has reached Riyadh, the oil industry and the pilgrimage.

It has also found that few allies will stand beside it. Donald Trump has no intention of entering Yemen; if the United States returns to war, it will strike Iran, not the Houthis. European governments have offered little more than sympathy. The Soufan Center concluded that the United States, the Gulf states, Pakistan and Türkiye (Turkey) have all declined to provide direct military support, despite the Mecca defence agreement signed in August. The Atlantic recalled why: Ottoman Turkish armies suffered repeated historic defeats in Yemen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Egypt sent its army into Yemen in the 1960s and lost Sinai to Israel in 1967 while its forces were tied down there. Pakistan, with a large Shia minority and its own internal unrest, says it cannot commit ground troops to Yemen. Its soldiers in the kingdom are expected to take on defensive tasks only.

There has even been speculation that Benjamin Netanyahu could strike Yemen to buy normalisation with Saudi Arabia. That is unlikely. Israel’s first target is Iran, especially after the activity reported at the underground site known as Pickaxe Mountain near Natanz. But the speculation shows how far the ground has shifted under Riyadh.

Diplomacy has failed too. Saudi Arabia says it asked the Houthis to meet in Oman in recent weeks and they refused. The kingdom has not accepted Iranian mediation, and it now has dead of its own to avenge. Everything points to escalation. The main Saudi war on the Houthis is most likely to come after the US midterm elections on November 3.

While Saudi Arabia prepares, so do the Houthis. The Kheibar Shekan (also written Khyber Shekan) is an Iranian solid-fuel ballistic missile, an older design that Iran has supplied to the Houthis. On its own it is an ordinary ballistic missile, and that has a weakness. A ballistic missile is very fast and climbs above most of the atmosphere, but its path is predictable. Radars for systems such as THAAD pick it up at launch from Yemen, compute where it will come down and intercept it.

Iran changed that by fitting a maneuverable reentry vehicle, known as a MaRV. Small fins on the separating warhead let it change course as it falls. If THAAD has calculated that the warhead is heading for a particular city or energy plant, it can end up somewhere else entirely, which makes it far harder to intercept.

Now the Houthis appear to be building their own. According to Conflict Armament Research findings reported by The Wall Street Journal, the group imported custom metal missile parts, control fins and solid rocket motor components from a Chinese supplier, along with test equipment and heat-shield materials, apparently to make a version of the Kheibar Shekan. Yemeni authorities intercepted two such shipments hidden among other cargo last year. Reports put the missile’s range at about 1,930 kilometres (1,200 miles), with precision and the ability to maneuver in its final phase. China says it does not arm the Houthis and respects the UN arms embargo. The likely model is that Iran supplies the missile while the Houthis assemble the maneuvering warheads locally, in workshops buried in their mountains, away from Iran.

For Saudi Arabia, the problem is not simply more missiles. It is missiles that are harder to stop, as the limits of the kingdom’s shield already showed in why Saudi air defences fail against Houthi attacks.