The Houthis Hit Saudi Oil for the First Time Since 2022, and Riyadh Is Back in a War It Left
A three-day exchange — tanker claims, Saudi strikes on Hodeidah, missiles at Jazan and Yanbu — has ended the de facto truce between Riyadh and Sanaa that had held since 2022.
The sequence is short and each step is attributable. On Thursday 23 July the Houthis claimed their first attack on commercial shipping in months, saying they had targeted two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea with missiles and drones; Bloomberg carried the claim, not an independent verification of a hit. On Friday the Saudi-led coalition struck Houthi targets in Hodeidah, confirmed in CNN’s file. Early Saturday, Saudi authorities issued emergency warnings for Jazan and Yanbu provinces at around 06:10 local time, telling residents to shelter, as Houthi missiles and drones came in. Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said in a prerecorded statement that the attack targeted Aramco facilities, and the group framed it as retaliation for Hodeidah. The Washington Post, filing from Beirut, dated the significance precisely: these were the first such strikes on Saudi oil facilities since 2022.
Beyond that spine, the reporting thins fast. A fire at the Aramco refinery at Jizan is carried by Militarnyi, a Ukrainian defence outlet aggregating Ansarallah media and a Houthi video — partisan-sourced and single-sourced. TechTimes adds a start time, a casualty on Kamaran Island, and a Houthi foreign ministry line about “escalation for escalation,” sourcing Al-Masirah, the Houthis' own channel; none of it is independently corroborated. The same outlet claims Brent “surged above $100 per barrel in early Saturday trading,” which cannot be true as stated: Brent futures do not trade on Saturday. What the market actually did was test the line and reject it. Forbes Advisor has Brent opening 24 July at $100.57 and falling 3.34% over twenty-four hours to $97.24; Trading Economics has it at $98.38, down 2.29% on the day but up 30.3% on the month and 43.75% year-on-year.
Assessment: Riyadh spent four years buying quiet on its southern border and has now paid for it twice — once in the original truce, and again in the strikes that ended it. The question is not whether the Houthis can burn a refinery but whether Saudi Arabia can fight in Yemen and shelter Yanbu at the same time while its export routes at Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb are both contested. On the numbers, distrust anything sourced only to Al-Masirah or to aggregators of it, and distrust weekend Brent prints entirely. The market’s own verdict is more instructive than the claims: oil tested $100 and came back down, because cargo is still moving. That is the assumption the next escalation is aimed at.