Saudi Arabia Has Moved From Defence to Revenge Against the Houthis, and Netanyahu Wants to Reopen the Iran War Behind It

For years the kingdom left Houthi power stations and fuel tanks largely alone, and the reason was simple arithmetic. A power station in Sanaa and a Saudi refinery are not worth the same. If Riyadh hit Houthi energy, the Houthis would answer against Saudi oil facilities, and the kingdom had far more to lose. Restraint was a calculation, not weakness.

The Houthis destroyed that calculation themselves. They struck Saudi energy sites, then turned on civilian airports. The October 10 barrage on King Khalid International Airport killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300, and a further strike on the airport killed one more person and wounded 11. That was a flagrant attack on civilians and a breach of every red line. Once the Houthis were already hitting Saudi energy and Saudi airports, sparing their fuel no longer bought Riyadh anything.

This is also not Saudi Arabia copying Israel’s strikes on Hodeidah port. The aim is different. The Houthis have seized wide stretches of western Yemen since September, including Mocha and Mayyun Island at the Bab al-Mandeb strait, and holding that ground depends on supply roads and fuel. As long as a force has fuel, it can move. Burn the depots and you freeze the trucks, the reinforcements and the launchers. The strikes also show that Saudi air power is operating freely over Houthi territory, despite the group’s earlier claim to have shot down a Saudi F-15 and its boast that Saudi jets would not dare return.

The Houthis answered in kind. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree called Saudi oil facilities “a legitimate target” and warned staff to evacuate Aramco’s headquarters in Dhahran, King Khalid airport and an Aramco-affiliated refinery in Riyadh, sites the group had previously left alone. The same day a Houthi strike set fire to an Aramco administrative building in Dhahran, without casualties, according to the Saudi Energy Ministry. The energy war that both sides avoided for years has now begun. We examined that Dhahran strike in why the Houthis hit Aramco’s Dhahran complex now.

Asked on October 13 what he would do about the Houthis, Donald Trump said they had behaved badly, that they had “misbehaved”. The choice of word matters. It is how a president describes an ally or a country Washington deals with, not a group that has just killed civilians at a capital’s airport. He did not say they would pay a price, the language he uses for enemies. Washington is giving Riyadh intelligence and targeting support, but it is not joining the fight.

The remark that travelled further came when a reporter asked whether he might ask Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to step into Yemen. Trump said Erdogan was his friend, that he could ask him for anything, and that he was thinking about it. Much of the region read that as a Turkish entry into the war. It is not. Trump was reacting to a reporter’s question; he did not raise Turkey himself, and he did not say Ankara was eager to fight.

The Turks will not send soldiers into Yemen, and neither will the Pakistanis. Turkey and Pakistan agreed with Saudi Arabia on October 5 to activate deterrence measures under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed in August and to deploy forces to the kingdom. Pakistan has confirmed that forces are in Saudi Arabia, and The New York Times reported that Pakistani jets were flying against the Houthis, a claim Islamabad calls fabricated. Whatever the air role, their mission is to defend Saudi Arabia. Nobody is putting allied troops on the ground in Yemen. That fight belongs to the Yemeni government’s forces and to Saudi Arabia.

The largest danger is not coming from Yemen. Benjamin Netanyahu discussed a major new military operation against Iran with Trump in a call last week, before the Israeli and US elections, Axios reported (via Ya Libnan), citing US and Israeli officials. Netanyahu raised Israeli intelligence that Iran was taking steps to rebuild its nuclear programme, including concern that it could use the Pickaxe Mountain site for uranium enrichment, and the talks covered a possible joint US-Israeli operation against military and nuclear sites.

Netanyahu is the reason the region is in this situation at all. He went to Trump and sold him the first war on Iran on the promise that it would kill the Supreme Leader and hand Tehran to the opposition. None of that happened, and the whole region has paid for it. Now he is asking for a second round. Trump did not tell him to drop the idea. According to a US official, he answered, “Well, you know, Bibi, go ahead and get ready.” The official described it as “maybe now, maybe later, maybe never”.

After the call, the White House said Trump would not attack Iran at any time before the midterm elections on November 3, and called reports that the two discussed resuming the war “false”. Israel votes on October 27. That leaves a window of a few weeks in which Washington says it will not move. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Central Command are the strongest supporters of another large-scale operation, and the Israeli military and Central Command are completing readiness measures in case Trump changes his mind. The window is a pause, not a decision.

Tehran has answered with threats in which Saudi Arabia appears again and again. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 13 that Iranian officials privately warned Gulf counterparts of ground incursions into neighbouring states and strikes on Saudi oil facilities if the United States resumes bombing. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said on state television that if war breaks out, “many of these cables, data centres, artificial intelligence facilities and numerous other sites will be destroyed”, pointing to US-linked assets in the UAE and around the Strait of Hormuz, Roya News reported.

This is deterrence talk. Threats are one thing; what Iran can actually do on the ground is another. Iran cannot do all of this, and it does not want another war. But the pattern of the threats is what matters for Riyadh. If the Iran war returns, Saudi Arabia will be hit from three fronts at once: from Iran, from Iran-backed militias in Iraq and from the Houthis in Yemen, all aimed at one thing, Saudi energy. That would not be a separate war. The Houthi war would merge into the Iran war, and the whole region would burn.

How does one of the world’s ten biggest military spenders keep getting hit? Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion on its armed forces last year, $83 billion by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s count. In one year, not five or ten, it bought Patriot and THAAD air defence systems, US fighter jets and advanced French and British weapons, and signed for F-35s. An army funded on that scale should be fearsome. American outlets including CNN and NBC News have asked the same question, and their answers point to four problems.

The first is size. Saudi Arabia is roughly three times the size of Texas, and its energy sites and airports are spread across the country rather than gathered in one place. Abqaiq is a dense hub, but the East-West pipeline alone runs about 1,200 kilometres. No air defence network can cover all of that. “Expecting a country the size of Saudi Arabia to intercept every missile is simply unrealistic,” analyst Ali Shihabi told NBC News.

The second is that the kingdom faces three fronts, not one. Even Russia and Ukraine face each other across a single front. Saudi Arabia is threatened from Iran to the east, from militias in Iraq that have sent drones against the East-West pipeline in the north, and from the Houthis in the south. Iran alone fired about 1,000 missiles and drones at Saudi targets during the most intense part of the war this year, CNN reported.

The third is method. The Houthis fire Iranian-designed weapons the way Iran fires at the Gulf: low-flying cruise missiles together with ballistic missiles and long-range drones, launched in numbers meant to saturate and confuse radars so that some get through. They claim their new ballistic missiles can manoeuvre. “They’ve learned how to oversaturate the radars,” said Andreas Krieg of King’s College London. No air defence system in the world has fully stopped attacks of this kind; even Russia, a master of air defence, has not.

The fourth is miscalculation. Riyadh relied on its options: the Emirati alliance, its defence partnership with the United States, the 2023 normalisation with Iran and its own understandings with the Houthis. All of them collapsed in quick succession: the rift with the UAE, then the Iran war, then an America bogged down in that war and unwilling to help, and finally the Houthis turning on the kingdom and expanding. Former US ambassador Michael Ratney said the kingdom had assumed the Houthis would not hit civilian targets such as airports.