Local Editor
Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement said they launched a ballistic missile at the Abha airport in southern Saudi Arabia on Wednesday night in retaliation for air strikes earlier in the day near the Yemen capital that killed eight women and a child.
Saba, Yemen’s official news agency, said a long-range ballistic missile was fired at the Saudi airport, describing “balls of fires” at the scene of the strike. But the Saudi-led coalition, which seeks to restore the Yemeni government, said the missile had been “intercepted and destroyed without any damage”.
According to the Saudi official news agency, the coalition responded by targeting the launch site. Earlier on Wednesday, coalition air strikes hit mourners at funeral gathering in a village 30km north of Sanaa, Saba reported.
The latest cross-border exchanges will undermine attempts to restart negotiations to end the two-year conflict that has claimed more than 10,000 civilian lives.
In recent weeks, the Saudi-led coalition has pushed along Yemen’s western seaboard, capturing the port of Mokha and targeting the port of Hodeida to put pressure on the supply lines of the Houthis and their allies loyal to the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
One of Riyadh’s main concerns about the Houthi forces’ rise to power in Yemen has been the revolutionaries’ ability to target the Saudi mainland with ballistic missiles.
Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a deadly campaign against Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall the former Yemeni government.
The offensive has claimed 11,403 lives and left 19,343 others wounded, according to figures compiled by the Legal Center for Rights and Development, a Yemeni non-governmental monitoring group.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
