Houthi missiles and drones set two Saudi Aramco refineries ablaze this weekend, hours after Saudi Arabia struck Yemen for the first time since a 2022 truce. Brent crude jumped back above $100 a barrel. The strikes on Jizan and Yanbu are the first direct hits on Saudi oil infrastructure in four years.
Saudi Arabia bought a three year rapprochement with Iran in 2023 partly to prevent this exact scenario. Riyadh’s own strikes on Yemen a day earlier, its first offensive move against the Houthis since the 2022 truce, suggest that insurance has run out just as the broader war between Iran and the United States nears its fifth month.
Twin Strikes Set Aramco’s Red Sea Refineries Ablaze
The attack hit before dawn on Saturday. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group targeted “sensitive Aramco affiliated facilities in Jizan with dozens of ballistic missiles and drones,” and struck Yanbu’s export terminal to the north with a mix of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones.
Satellite fire detection recorded substantial thermal anomalies at the Jizan site around 1:17 a.m. UTC. Regional media counted at least five explosions. Commercial flights bound for the area diverted or entered holding patterns.
A video verified by AFP showed dark clouds rising above the refinery. Hodeida resident Faiza, a 36 year old mother of two, told AFP the strikes sounded like “the sound of thunder,” describing three distinct blasts near her home the night before.
“I didn’t want to believe that we had gone back to strikes,” she said.
- Ansar Allah – Arabic for “Partisans of God,” the formal name of the Houthi movement; a Zaidi Shia group that has ruled Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since 2014 and lines up with Iran’s regional network alongside Hezbollah and Hamas.
Riyadh Broke the Truce First
The sequence began Friday, when Saudi Arabia struck Ansar Allah positions inside Yemen. A Yemeni security source told AFP the targets included a naval base in the port city of Hodeida and a military camp on Kamaran Island.
The Houthis called it a “dangerous escalation.” Their retaliation came within a day.
Yemen’s civil war between Ansar Allah and the Saudi-backed government has run since 2015, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Fighting had largely frozen after a UN-negotiated truce in 2022, and Friday’s strikes were the first time Riyadh had gone on the offensive against the Houthis since that truce took hold. The move lands inside a war that has already reshaped the region’s strategic map since the United States and Israel struck Iran at the end of February.
Who Pays While the Front Reopens
A reopened Saudi-Houthi front spreads the cost of the wider war across several groups that had little say in starting it.
- Yemeni civilians – the war has killed hundreds of thousands of people since 2015 and left a humanitarian crisis the 2022 truce never fully resolved.
- Oil importers – Brent crude gained nearly 14 percent over the week even before Saturday’s strikes landed, then pushed further above $100 a barrel once the Jizan and Yanbu fires broke out.
- Tanker owners and insurers – a separate incident involving a tanker and unspecified military forces was reported near the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations monitor, and war risk premiums on that route tend to reset higher after every fresh incident.
- Riyadh’s own diplomacy – the credibility of a three year old rapprochement with Tehran is now on the line, since preventing exactly this kind of strike was the point of the deal.
A 2019 Playbook Returns
Saudi Aramco has been here before. In September 2019, drones and missiles struck the Abqaiq stabilization plant and the Khurais oil field in eastern Saudi Arabia. The Houthis claimed responsibility, saying they launched the strike from Yemen with ten drones.
Saudi and American officials disputed that account, saying the weapons were Iranian made and fired from the north and east. A Congressional Research Service review found the attack knocked out roughly 5.7 million barrels a day, over half of Saudi Arabia’s output, at a plant that alone handles about 7 percent of global oil production.
Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said afterward the company had emerged “stronger than ever.” A smaller strike hit an Aramco fuel depot in Jeddah in March 2022, days before the truce that has now unraveled.
| Event | Date | Facilities Hit | Reported Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abqaiq-Khurais attack | Sept 14, 2019 | Abqaiq stabilization plant, Khurais field | About 5.7 million barrels a day disrupted, over half of Saudi output |
| Jeddah depot fire | March 2022 | Aramco fuel storage site | Came days before the UN-brokered truce took hold |
| Jizan and Yanbu strikes | July 25, 2026 | Two Aramco refinery and export complexes | No official damage tally yet; Jizan alone processes about 400,000 barrels a day |
The Insurance Policy Riyadh Bought From Beijing
Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations on March 10, 2023, after seven years of severed ties, in a deal brokered by China and signed in Beijing by Iran’s Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud. Embassies reopened. Officials later met again in Beijing to discuss resuming flights and visas.
The deal was never purely diplomatic. An Atlantic Council assessment of the pact’s first year concluded that Riyadh’s central motive was insurance against Houthi attacks on its own territory, and a chance to end the war on its southern border. Reports at the time suggested Tehran would stop supplying weapons to the Houthis; Iran reportedly agreed at least to stop encouraging their attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Iran never fully controlled Houthi decision making, the same analysis found. Saturday’s strikes on two Aramco complexes are the clearest evidence yet that whatever Tehran promised, it could not deliver in practice.
Trump’s Undecided Tipping Point
The Yemen front reopened inside a much larger war. Iran’s military said Friday it struck US assets in Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait; Jordan’s government separately said it intercepted three Iranian missiles over its airspace earlier in the campaign. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they also hit an Amazon data centre in Bahrain, a claim neither the tech giant nor Bahrain’s government has addressed.
President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he had not decided whether to launch major strikes on Iran. “No, I haven’t,” he said, adding that Tehran was “getting more and more serious” in talks with Washington. He said Iran faced a choice between a deal or a “much higher level” of strikes, and that his red line remained any sign Iran was nearing a nuclear weapon.
The war Trump once predicted would last four or five weeks is nearing its fifth month, a stretch weighing on his approval ratings ahead of November’s midterms.
What is confirmed:
- Four US service members have been killed in Iranian strikes on American bases since the wider campaign began.
- Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait all hosted US military assets that Iran’s military said it targeted on Friday.
- Thirteen consecutive nights of US strikes on Iran paused on Saturday for the first time.
What remains unconfirmed:
- Neither Amazon nor Bahrain’s government has confirmed the Revolutionary Guards’ claim about the data centre.
- The United States has not confirmed any of its own facilities or personnel were hit on Friday.
- Saudi Arabia and Aramco had issued no official casualty count or damage assessment from the Jizan and Yanbu strikes as of Saturday.
Back in Hodeida, Faiza said she had grown used to the truce holding, even an uneasy one. Now she listens for the next explosion instead.
