Saudi Energy Minister Vows an Equally Serious Response
“The events of recent weeks are serious. Our response must be equally serious,” Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman told an energy congress in Riyadh, about ten kilometres from an airport struck four times in a week. He said energy security “cannot be taken for granted”. Saudi airports remain shut.
Holding a global energy conference within artillery distance of a closed international airport is itself the message, and the minister leaned into it: recent events had tested “our infrastructure, our institutions, our people, and our resilience”, and “we hold your protection at whole heart”. Several oil company chiefs stayed away. The Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said his forces had hit the airports at Riyadh and Dammam and two oil and gas facilities in Eastern Province in reply to 124 Saudi air strikes on Yemen in a single day, promising “a blockade for a blockade” and “an escalation for an escalation”, and repeating a warning to airlines against using Saudi airspace except for Mecca and Medina. At least thirteen people were killed and more than three hundred injured in Saturday’s strike on King Khalid International; a Houthi-run health ministry says a child was killed in a Saudi strike on a home in Sanaa on Sunday. The Foreign Office still advises Britons against all but essential travel to every Saudi airport but Medina.