Houthi projectiles struck Saudi Arabia’s Najran border region wounding 11 civilians including a Pakistani national, hours after the group launched its deadliest assault on Yemen government forces since 2022 killing 58 soldiers.
By Imran Malik | World Affairs & Gulf Desk | MediaBites.com.pk | SharjahNews.ae
Iran-backed Houthi forces struck Saudi Arabia’s southern border region of Najran late Thursday, wounding 11 civilians — including a Pakistani national — in an indiscriminate projectile attack that came hours after the group launched its deadliest assault on Yemen’s government military forces in four years.
The back-to-back attacks have dramatically deepened fears that Yemen’s decade-long conflict is entering a new and significantly more dangerous phase — one that is drawing in Saudi Arabia directly and threatening the broader regional stability that a fragile US-Iran ceasefire had briefly seemed to promise.
Who Was Wounded in Najran
The Saudi-led Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen confirmed that 11 civilians were wounded when Houthi projectiles fired indiscriminately struck civilian areas in Najran.
Coalition spokesman Major General Turki Al-Malki identified the wounded as seven Saudi citizens, one Yemeni national, two Egyptians, and one Pakistani national.
Among the Saudi wounded were a woman and a four-year-old child who suffered second-degree burns — a detail that captures the deliberate civilian targeting that Al-Malki accused the Houthis of carrying out in violation of international humanitarian law.
For Pakistan, the wounding of a Pakistani national in Najran is a direct and personal dimension of a conflict that Islamabad has been working diplomatically to contain. Pakistan’s approximately 2.5 million workers in Saudi Arabia live and work across the Kingdom, including in border regions — and Houthi attacks on Saudi civilian areas place that community in direct physical danger.
58 Soldiers Killed — The Deadliest Strike Since 2022
The Najran civilian attack came hours after a far larger and more devastating Houthi military operation.
A large-scale Houthi missile and drone assault struck military camps in the Marib and Hadramout governorates of Yemen — killing at least 58 government soldiers and wounding dozens more, according to local sources cited by AFP. It is the deadliest single strike against Yemen’s internationally recognized government forces since 2022.
The coalition expressed condolences to families of those killed while reaffirming Saudi Arabia’s support for Yemen’s internationally recognised government and its commitment to taking all deterrent measures to protect civilians.
How the Truce Collapsed
The current escalation has a specific trigger. The Houthis, who control the capital Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, abandoned a fragile truce with the Saudi-backed government after welcoming an Iranian aircraft into Sanaa — a move that triggered a new cycle of hostilities.
Following the truce collapse, the Houthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi ports and began targeting Saudi-linked shipping — the escalation that drew international alarm and triggered the diplomatic scramble involving Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, and Turkey that preceded the US-Iran ceasefire.
Last month, Houthi fighters killed 16 government-aligned troops south of the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, according to medical officials — a precursor to Thursday’s far larger assault.
Yemen — A Decade of Devastation
Yemen has been devastated by more than a decade of conflict since the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, sparking a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Although the UN-brokered truce reached in 2022 significantly reduced fighting for two years, the latest attacks have raised fears among regional analysts and humanitarian organizations that the conflict is entering a new phase — one entangled with the broader US-Iran confrontation and with consequences that extend far beyond Yemen’s borders.
The wounded child in Najran. The 58 soldiers killed in Marib and Hadramout. The Pakistani worker caught in the crossfire. These are the human faces of a conflict that political and military actors continue to escalate while humanitarian consequences accumulate.
