The Saudi -led coalition fighting the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said it thwarted a missile attack on the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia.
And a former chief of Israel’s domestic security service has filed a defamation suit against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The latest conflict between the Saudis and the Houthis began last month after the rebels seized key areas along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a critical waterway for oil shipments. The Saudi-led coalition, backing forces aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognized government, has been trying to retake those areas. Its figures are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. It doesn’t give a breakdown of civilians and militants. The government’s counterinsurgency spiraled into widespread violence in which hundreds of civilians — most of them Alawites — were killed.
More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the ceasefire was reached in October last year, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. In March 2025, loyalists of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad attacked members of the new government’s security forces in areas where a large segment of the country’s Alawite religious minority lives.
Meanwhile, the Houthis claimed an attack in the port city of Aden at a site used by the Saudi-backed and internationally recognized government, where an official said at least two people were killed. The Saudi-led coalition said in a statement that it intercepted and destroyed a cruise missile over the province of Medina, but notably did not assign blame for the attack. Many of Yemen’s government leaders live in exile, and those in Aden were safe, a government official said. Netanyahu, in a post last month on X, accused Bar of “failures and crimes” in the hours before the attack, when Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages , setting off a massive Israeli bombardment and invasion that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
