From Jizan and Yanbu to the Eastern region and Riyadh… Yemeni operations enter the point of no return in their second week

Yemeni operations against Saudi Arabia entered a new phase in their second week on Monday, with a new large-scale attack recorded in the east of the Kingdom. So where is the situation heading and what are its dimensions?

Exclusive – Al-Khabar Al-Yemeni:

Last Monday, Yemen decided to return to military confrontation with Saudi Arabia after about 5 years of a fragile truce that failed to achieve even the minimum demands of the Yemeni people. The Saudi aggression on Sana’a Airport, in an attempt to prevent any move to lift the air siege, further fueled the trend towards confrontation.

In its first phase, Yemen imposed a ban on Saudi navigation, starting with preventing Saudi ships, then moving to preventing sailing to and from Saudi ports, and finally striking Saudi ships within the Kingdom’s territorial waters. In each instance, Yemen’s messages to Saudi Arabia were clear, including purely humanitarian demands: lifting the air and naval siege and ending Saudi interventions in Yemen’s internal affairs. However, Saudi Arabia, as usual, met the step with further escalation. It proceeded to launch more raids on Hudaydah, its port, and Kamaran Island in an attempt to tighten the naval siege. However, the response was not long in coming, arriving just hours later in the form of concentrated missile and drone strikes targeting Saudi oil facilities in Jizan and Yanbu, the largest sources of Saudi oil exports on the Red Sea.

Although eyes were anticipating de-escalation and preventing the war from sliding to a new level, Saudi insistence on further escalation by sending Turkish fighter jets and drones to launch a new aggression on Yemen pushed the confrontation to a seemingly more dangerous level, at a crossroads of no return. This is especially true with Yemen’s decision to expand its target bank to include the eastern regions of the Kingdom, including the capital Riyadh.

These developments indicate that the Yemeni-Saudi confrontation has entered a new phase as it enters its second week. This confrontation indicates that the situation for Saudi Arabia is more dangerous than before. Previous operations were conducted with capabilities far less than what Yemeni technology has achieved today. What Saudi Arabia was able to control within two or three days, it is now incapable of containing even as the first week approaches its end.