Saudi Arabia said on Wednesday that an attack on an Aramco building in the kingdom's east sparked a "limited fire," as US President Donald Trump slammed Yemen's Houthis for "behaving very badly." A Saudi energy ministry official said an administrative building belonging to oil giant Aramco in Dhahran was struck on Tuesday evening, resulting in a "limited fire" but "no casualties or fatalities". Saudi's civil defence agency separately said on Wednesday that debris from two intercepted Houthi missiles wounded four people in the capital Riyadh, and that 15 homes were damaged. Earlier on Tuesday, the coalition struck oil sites across western Yemen, in response to the deadliest attack on the kingdom's soil in years.
The strikes in Yemen's Houthi-held capital Sana'a and the western provinces of Dhamar and Saada targeted facilities used to "supply the war effort" by the Houthis to "threaten the kingdom, Yemen, the southern Red Sea and waterways", coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki wrote on X. A powerful explosion then rang out in the Saudi capital, with a phone alert sent to residents saying "the city of Riyadh is facing a hostile aerial threat". While walking down a major avenue in Riyadh, a witness said he "saw a projectile cutting across the sky" above a mall, leaving "a yellowish trail of light followed by a trail of smoke.
Then, we heard an explosion". "People were calm, no one was speaking. We were scared and all looking up at the sky," he added, requesting anonymity.
Witnesses reported further explosions in Riyadh on Wednesday. After Houthi strikes on Saudi airports and energy sites in recent days, the Saudi-led coalition issued its first evacuation order in the Yemeni capital since the war flared in July, before attacking the Yemen Petroleum Company facility on Sana'a's outskirts. A breaking news alert on the Houthi-affiliated Al-Masirah TV channel said "Saudi aggression" targeted the oil firm.
The Houthis had earlier issued a new threat to target Riyadh's international airport, a refinery, and an Aramco facility in Dammam if the strike went ahead, calling for citizens to avoid them. Many countries have issued travel warnings to their citizens in Saudi Arabia, most recently France, which told its citizens to avoid Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam airports. A strike on Riyadh's international airport on Saturday left 13 people dead and operations suspended in the worst attack since 2015.
The airport attack prompted US President Donald Trump to say he was considering joining Saudi strikes against the Houthis. He wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday that "the Houthis are behaving very badly", accusing them of acting "probably at the behest of Iran". "I thought they learned their lesson a year ago when we bombed the hell out of them," Trump added, laying the blame for their actions on Tehran.
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