A Houthi Projectile Hit a Residential Street in Najran. Six People Were Hurt.

The missile war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis landed on a different kind of target on Sunday: a residential street. A Houthi projectile struck a neighborhood in Najran, a Saudi city on the Yemen border, and injured six people — the first time in weeks of near-daily attacks that ordinary homes, not airports or military sites, took the hit.

Saudi Arabia’s General Directorate of Civil Defense said the projectile came down in a residential area of Najran earlier in the day. “On Sunday, civil defense in the city of Najran responded to the fall of an enemy projectile launched by the terrorist Houthi militia at a residential site, resulting in six citizens being injured and material damage to three homes and three vehicles,” the agency said in a statement posted on X.

The agency said its emergency teams responded and followed standard procedures, and condemned attempts to target civilian objects as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

Civil Defense had sent mobile-phone alerts warning of “potential danger” in Najran earlier in the afternoon, then told residents the danger had passed.

The Houthis — formally Ansar Allah, the Iran-backed movement that has ruled northern Yemen since capturing the capital Sanaa in 2014 — did not immediately claim responsibility for the Najran strike. In recent weeks the group has claimed most of its attacks on Saudi targets, which have concentrated on airports, airbases, and oil infrastructure. Attribution for this one rests with Saudi authorities for now.

Najran had a violent Sunday even without this strike. In a separate incident the same day, an AH-6i reconnaissance helicopter crashed in the Najran region, killing both crew members. The Saudi-led coalition blamed a technical malfunction; Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed on X that his forces had shot the helicopter down. It was not immediately clear whether the two sides were even talking about the same aircraft.

Sunday was one of the busiest days yet in an escalation that has turned Saudi Arabia’s southwest into a near-daily battle zone. Around 1:30 a.m., Civil Defense pushed “hostile aerial threat” alerts to phones in Riyadh and the southern city of Khamis Mushait. The Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted and destroyed two ballistic missiles fired toward Khamis Mushait, along with three drones over Riyadh and the kingdom’s Eastern Province. On Saturday, it said four more drones had been intercepted and that two Houthi missile launchers were destroyed in Yemen’s Saada province.

The attacks keep bleeding into civilian life. Riyadh’s airport — hit twice in recent days, with the death toll from Saturday’s strike rising to 13 after an injured Indian citizen died — is effectively closed to normal traffic. The 99-storey Kingdom Centre tower ordered mandatory remote work “until further notice”. Schools in the capital are learning remotely. Several foreign embassies have advised their citizens to avoid Saudi airports.

Why this matters

For most of this month, the Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia has aimed at airports, military bases, and energy infrastructure — high-value targets in a war the Houthis frame as retaliation for the Saudi-led coalition’s renewed offensive in Yemen. A projectile falling on houses in a border city is something else. It suggests either deliberate targeting of civilians or, just as worrying, increasingly inaccurate strikes landing where people live.

Najran has been on this front line before. The city absorbed cross-border rockets for years during the last round of the Yemen war. Its residents are now living through a repeat — with the added risk that this time the fighting is folded into a much larger regional war, the one the United States and Israel are waging against Iran. Washington says it is weighing whether to join the strikes on the Houthis. Egypt’s parliament is preparing to authorize forces to defend Saudi Arabia. The United Arab Emirates has rejoined the fight on the Saudi side after a January rift.

Every escalation narrows the space for the war to end. In Najran, three families are tonight looking at damaged homes — and a border city is learning, again, that the war does not stop at military targets.