RIYADH, October 24, 2026 — Saudi air defenses intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels toward the capital early on Saturday, the Saudi-led coalition said, minutes after two loud blasts reverberated across Riyadh and early-warning alerts sent residents of three regions scrambling for shelter.
Blasts Heard Across the Capital
Shortly past 4 a.m. local time, the Saudi Civil Defense sounded alarms through its Early Warning Platform, warning residents of potential incoming aerial threats across Riyadh, Najran, and the southern governorate of Wadi Al-Dawasir, officials said. Minutes after the alerts were issued, two loud explosions rang out in the capital, an AFP journalist in Riyadh reported.
“Air defenses intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by the Houthi terrorist militia toward Riyadh,” coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki said in a statement posted on X. In an earlier post, Al-Maliki said a drone had been intercepted and destroyed in the Eastern Province.
Authorities later said the danger had passed in all three alert zones, though no details were immediately released about whether any debris fell inside the capital.
A Week of Deadly Escalation
The latest attack is the most direct strike at the Saudi capital in days and follows a string of deadly Houthi operations across the kingdom this week. On Wednesday evening, an attack on Dammam’s King Fahd International Airport killed two people — a Saudi citizen and an Indian resident — and injured eight others, according to the Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation.
Separately, debris from an intercepted drone fell in the Eastern Province on Wednesday morning, killing two residents from the Philippines and Nepal, the energy ministry said. The drone had been intercepted while attempting to target a processing facility operated by state oil giant Aramco at the Shaybah oil field, where a contractor’s vehicle was set ablaze.
The Houthis’ military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said on Thursday that the group had targeted several Saudi sites over the preceding 48 hours, including the defense ministry headquarters in Riyadh, an Aramco facility in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu, and Abha International Airport in the south. The group did not immediately claim responsibility for Saturday’s missile or the Shaybah drone.
Regional Tensions Rising
The flare-up comes amid sharply rising tensions between the United States and Iran, which Saudi officials accuse of encouraging the Houthis’ escalation — a charge Tehran has denied. A U.S. envoy has said a strike on Iran is possible this weekend, while President Donald Trump has warned Tehran of another “epic fury” operation, state media reported.
Najran, along the kingdom’s southwestern border with Yemen, has faced recurrent cross-border rocket and drone fire, while Wadi Al-Dawasir lies deep in the southern reaches of Riyadh province near the Rub’ al-Khali desert. Cross-border strikes have surged sharply since an uneasy four-year truce broke down in July, months into the US-Iran conflict that has plunged the wider region into crisis, analysts said.
The Yemen conflict, which erupted in late 2014 when the Houthis seized Sanaa, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and plunged the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest nation into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
