Saudi Arabia welcomed Jordan’s announcement Friday that Royal Jordanian Airlines will launch regular commercial flights between Amman and Sanaa, the Yemeni capital held by Houthi forces since 2014. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said the carrier is finishing the technical and logistical work needed to start service, though no launch date has been set. Four days earlier, warplanes struck that same runway to stop an Iranian jet from landing.
The two events trace back to one disputed flight, a funeral delegation, and a runway that rival Yemeni factions both claim credit for hitting. Jordan is opening a second door into Sanaa’s airspace at the exact moment a four-year truce there just came apart.
Royal Jordanian Prepares a New Amman-Sanaa Route
Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said the new service comes in response to humanitarian need in Yemen and in support of Saudi Arabia’s push to keep a stalled peace process alive, according to the ministry statement reported by Yemen Monitor, a Yemen-focused news outlet. The ministry called the route the outcome of earlier understandings between Amman and Sanaa on restoring air links, not a decision made on the fly.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency, welcomed the plan as a way to ease civilian movement and meet humanitarian needs. It also pressed the Houthis to cooperate and stop actions that deepen Yemen’s crisis, according to Asharq Al-Awsat’s report on the statement.
Yemen’s internationally recognized government approved the initiative too, but attached a condition. Flights should preserve state sovereignty and run through channels the government controls, ideally via Yemenia, the national carrier, to any mutually agreed destination. That condition points directly at the kind of flight that triggered this month’s crisis in the first place.
The Runway Was Bombed Four Days Earlier
The diplomatic praise arrived four days after Yemen’s Defense Ministry said its forces carried out the strike that shut down Sanaa’s airport on Monday, July 13, to block a Mahan Air jet arriving from Tehran. Mahan Air is an Iranian carrier sanctioned by the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for ferrying Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) personnel, weapons and funds, Breitbart reported.
The jet was carrying a Houthi delegation home from the funeral of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, according to NBC News and the Times of Israel. Yemen’s government said it had offered to fly the delegation home aboard a Yemenia plane instead. The Houthis refused, and the Iranian aircraft diverted to Hodeidah, another Houthi-held airport on the Red Sea coast, after the strike closed Sanaa’s runway.
At this moment, we say that our patience has run out. Accordingly, we will respond appropriately to this treacherous and brutal act, and we will confront and deal with the hostile aircraft violating Yemeni airspace and sovereignty by all available means.
Yemen’s defense minister, Gen. Taher al-Aqili, said this in a video statement posted to X hours before the strike, warning against what he called Iranian infiltration of Yemeni airspace.
The Houthis retaliated within hours. Fighters fired missiles and drones at Abha International Airport in southern Saudi Arabia; the Saudi-led coalition said its air defenses intercepted the barrage. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree declared that the strike had ended the “de-escalation phase” that had held since 2022, warning that “this aggression will not go unanswered or unpunished.” A Houthi political bureau member, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, went further, telling Al Jazeera that “their willingness to attack Sanaa Airport to prevent flights from arriving or departing gives Yemen the right to strike their airports and to impose on them a siege just as they have done to us.”
Where the accounts split:
- The Houthis say Saudi Arabia carried out the strike directly, calling it a grave breach of the 2022 ceasefire.
- Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), the internationally recognized government based in Aden, has claimed responsibility itself, framing the strike as defense of its own sovereign airspace.
- Independent military analysts cited by Al-Monitor say the PLC likely lacks the aircraft to have carried out the strike alone, and that Saudi Arabia probably conducted or enabled it while letting the PLC claim credit.
That distinction carries diplomatic weight. Saudi Arabia has avoided direct military confrontation with the Houthis since a Beijing-brokered deal restored its ties with Tehran in March 2023, an arrangement this month’s Mahan Air flight into Houthi territory has visibly strained. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued that holing the runway will not settle much, since Houthi crews can quickly repair a cratered strip, and called instead for a more complete disabling of Sanaa airport if Iranian flights keep coming.
Why Route New Flights Through Amman?
Jordan’s corridor gives Saudi Arabia something Iran’s direct route does not: a way to inspect who and what is getting into Houthi-controlled territory. Every Royal Jordanian flight would pass through Jordanian soil first, subject to screening the Tehran-Sanaa route bypasses entirely.
Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical analyst, told Fox News that the Houthis “know that these flights can land normally if they follow the agreed-upon route through a Jordanian airport, for inspection purposes.” He argued the group is negotiating from one of its weakest positions of the war, since Yemen’s internationally recognized government has consolidated authority over roughly 80% of the country’s territory, in his assessment.
Nadwa al-Dawsari, a Yemen researcher at the Middle East Institute, a Washington policy institute, offers a different read on the underlying dispute. She said the Mahan Air flight itself was a deliberate signal from Tehran. “Iran and the Houthis were sending a political message: Tehran intends to normalize direct and public ties with Houthi-controlled Yemen and is willing to challenge the restrictions that have governed access to the country since 2015,” she said, according to Breitbart’s report on the standoff.
Her read complicates the humanitarian framing both governments have used publicly. A Jordanian stopover, flown by the airline of Riyadh’s closest Arab ally, doubles as a competing channel meant to keep Tehran’s preferred route from becoming the norm.
Who Actually Boards These Flights
Sanaa’s airport has not been without commercial service during the war. Yemenia, Yemen’s national carrier, restarted flights to Amman in May 2022 under the original UN-brokered truce, prioritizing medical patients who could not get treatment at home. The airline has run the Amman route ever since, alongside a brief, troubled expansion.
Simple Flying, an aviation news outlet, reported that Houthi authorities seized all four of Yemenia’s active aircraft in 2024, stranding roughly 1,300 pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, before the planes were returned and repatriation flights resumed. The stakes of any disruption are steep: The New Arab reported that Yemen’s civil war has left 80% of the population reliant on some form of aid.
Royal Jordanian would become the first foreign-flagged carrier to serve the route on a regular schedule. The airline has been rebuilding its wider network this year too. It recently resumed flights to Vienna, part of an effort to anchor Amman as a connecting hub between Europe and the Gulf, and a Sanaa service would extend that same strategy into one of the region’s hardest markets to serve.
| Carrier | Route | Status | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yemenia Airways | Sanaa to Amman | Operating since May 2022 | Yemen’s national carrier; prioritizes medical evacuees |
| Yemenia Airways | Sanaa to Cairo, Mumbai | Launched July 2024, uneven since | Tied to a deal releasing seized Yemenia jets |
| Royal Jordanian | Amman to Sanaa | Announced July 17, 2026; no start date | First foreign flag carrier on the route since 2014 |
The gap between those rows is the whole story: one national carrier hanging on through seizures and strikes, and one new entrant betting its brand on the same battered airspace.
A Runway With a Brutal History
Sanaa International Airport rests in a highland bowl more than 7,000 feet up, ringed by mountains that have watched the runway change hands and change shape for over a decade. Its recent history reads like a ledger of near misses and outright hits.
- August 2016: The Saudi-led coalition imposes a full closure on commercial traffic, permitting only limited United Nations and aid flights.
- May 2022: A UN-brokered truce reopens the airport after six years. The Norwegian Refugee Council called the first flight to Amman a “stepping stone towards sustainable peace.”
- 2024: Houthi authorities briefly seize Yemenia’s entire active fleet before releasing it, disrupting the Amman route for weeks.
- May 2025: Israeli airstrikes hit the airport after Houthi attacks toward Israel, destroying aircraft on the ground and leaving the facility largely out of action.
- July 3, 2026: An Iranian flight lands in Sanaa, the first publicly acknowledged Tehran-Sanaa service in more than a decade.
- July 13, 2026: Yemeni forces strike the runway to block a returning Iranian jet; Houthis retaliate with missiles at a Saudi airport.
- July 17, 2026: Jordan announces Royal Jordanian will add a second route into the same airport.
The Peace Track Saudi Arabia Keeps Citing
Both the Jordanian and Saudi statements this week invoked a Yemen peace process that has existed on paper for years but rarely moved. UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg said on July 11, two days before the airport strike, that he had secured assurances from both the government and the Houthis that they remained committed to a May 2026 agreement covering 1,600 detainees, South24, a Yemeni news outlet, reported.
The airport strike put that commitment in doubt almost immediately. Yemeni government sources told South24 that delays in the prisoner exchange were linked to the Houthis’ insistence that their delegation fly home from Tehran aboard an Iranian plane rather than a Yemeni one. Grundberg said afterward that his office was “actively engaging with all actors” and had contacted military representatives from all sides, urging them to “refrain from any actions that would risk a new cycle of violence in Yemen.”
Nobody Has Set a Launch Date Yet
Royal Jordanian has not said when the Sanaa flights will begin. Jordan’s foreign ministry described the technical and logistical work as still underway, with no timeline attached. Several conditions stand between Friday’s announcement and an actual takeoff.
- Ground cooperation. The Houthis still run day-to-day operations at Sanaa airport and have threatened to keep flying their own route to Tehran regardless of any new arrangement with Amman.
- Saudi restraint. Houthi officials have threatened to strike Saudi airports again if Riyadh interferes with future Iranian flights, a threat that would put any Amman-Sanaa service at risk too.
- The prisoner exchange. A stalled swap covering more than 1,600 detainees remains tangled up in the same dispute over who controls flights into Sanaa.
- A functioning runway. The strip Royal Jordanian would use is the same one bombed on July 13 and hit by Israeli strikes in 2025.
No airline has announced a firm date for its first flight. The last aircraft that tried a new route into Sanaa never made it there at all. It landed in Hodeidah instead.
