Houthi strikes wound three at Jazan and Najran airports as the coalition hits Sanaa

Saudi Arabia's civil aviation authority said on Tuesday that attacks on Monday evening wounded three people and caused material damage at King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Airport in Jazan and at Najran airport, both close to the Yemen border. The authority called the injuries minor in the body of its statement. A later line in the same account referred to injuries of varying severity. The wounded were taken to hospital. Specialised teams, the authority said, dealt with the strikes as they happened and are still assessing the buildings.

The Houthis, who also use the name Ansar Allah, said late on Monday that their forces had hit sites across southern Saudi Arabia, including airports and military positions. They framed the strikes as a reply to Saudi involvement in the war. Gulf Cooperation Council secretary-general Jassim al-Budaiwi called attacks on airports and civilian facilities a dangerous escalation and asked other governments to take a firm line. Kuwait's foreign ministry condemned what it called continued attacks on Saudi civilians and economic sites. Saudi defence minister Khalid bin Salman said the alliance had reaffirmed solidarity against attacks on the kingdom and on holy sites.

The coalition's own reply was already underway by Tuesday morning. It said it had destroyed a ballistic-missile launch platform in Sanaa, which the Houthis have held since 2014, and a storage site in Saada holding 20 ballistic missiles. Those two claims are the concrete military balance sheet of the night: three wounded and damaged terminals on the Saudi side of the border, a launcher and a 20-missile store on the Yemeni side. Neither figure has been independently counted.

The airport strikes sit inside a wider offensive that began earlier in the week. Forces loyal to Yemen's internationally recognised government, with Saudi air support, have been trying to take back ground the Houthis seized last month. They have retaken the Red Sea port of Mocha and say they now hold the Bab al-Mandeb approaches. Al Jazeera reported that Mocha remains surrounded by Houthi positions on three sides, which makes the port a gain and a liability at once. The coalition said about 100 fighter jets are flying in support of the government push, and that Saudi naval units have opened an operation off Hodeidah. Those numbers come from coalition and government-aligned accounts.

A separate political layer arrived the same week. Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia agreed to activate deterrence measures under their mutual defence arrangement and to deploy forces to Saudi Arabia. The airport attacks are the first public test of that arrangement since it was described. Deployment is not the same as engagement. No Turkish or Pakistani unit has been named in the Jazan or Najran response. The test, for now, is whether Riyadh treats the strikes as a trigger for that clause or as a continuation of the existing Yemen campaign.

Jazan and Najran are civilian airports serving the two southern provinces that took the brunt of Houthi cross-border fire in earlier years of the war. Hitting them on the evening before the coalition announced launcher strikes in Sanaa and Saada puts civilian aviation back on the target list after a period in which the fighting had moved south, toward Mocha and the strait. Passengers and staff are the group the aviation authority said it was still protecting on Tuesday. No flight-cancellation count has been published.

The casualty line needs to stay where the authority put it. Three people wounded, described as minor in one sentence and of varying severity in another, and material damage. That is not a mass-casualty strike. It is enough to close or slow two airports and to give the Houthis a claimed hit on Saudi soil in the same news cycle as the loss of Mocha. The coalition's 20-missile store in Saada, if the figure is accurate, is the larger loss of kit. A launcher can be rebuilt. Twenty missiles are twenty missiles.

What is still missing is a damage survey from either airport, a name for the weapon used, and a confirmation that Turkish or Pakistani forces have actually moved. Until those arrive, the verified core is the aviation authority's three wounded, the Houthi claim, and the coalition's account of a Sanaa launcher and a Saada store.