This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Saudi-led forces have launched airstrikes north of the Yemen port city of Hodeidah, claiming they were targeting Houthi rebels’ capacity to mount remote-controlled assaults on shipping in the Red Sea.

The Houthi rebels, battling Saudi support for the UN-recognised Yemen government for the past five years, claimed the airstrikes on four sites were in violation of the ceasefire agreement signed in December 2018 in Stockholm. A Houthi military spokesman described the assault as a serious escalation and a reprisal for the Houthi-claimed assault on Saudi oil installations last weekend.

Defending the attacks, the Saudi coalition spokesman, Turki Al-Malik, said: “The coalition’s naval forces detected an attempt by the terrorist Houthi militia backed by Iran to carry out an imminent act of aggression and terrorism in the southern Red Sea using an unmanned, rigged boat ... launched from Hodeidah province.”

The Saudi attacks were seen by the Houthis as an attempted show of strength in response to the last Saturday’s devastating assault on the Saudi Aramco oil facilities, a strike that exposed the vulnerability of the Saudi oilfields to terrorism.

The Houthis continue to claim responsibility for the attack on the facilities which temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity, and raised deep questions about Saudi Arabia’s ability to press ahead with its IPO sale. Videos showing cars queuing for petrol in Saudi Arabia were posted on social media.

Both Riyadh and Washington are continuing to point the finger directly at Iran, with the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, describing the attack as an act of war by Tehran.

Quick guide The Yemen conflict in numbers Show Hide 24m people – 80% of Yemen’s population - require some form of humanitarian or protection assistance. 3m people forced to flee their homes. 85,000 - Save the Children estimate that this number of children under the age of 5 may have died through hunger and malnutrition. 1m cases of cholera in 2017, the largest outbreak of the disease in recent history. 2,200 people died during it. A resurgence of the disease saw more than 137,000 suspected cases and almost 300 deaths in the first three months of 2019. Over 91,600 fatalities since the conflict started in 2015, as measured by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.

18,292 civilian casualties, including 8,598 killed 4,500 military strikes recorded that directly targeted civilians - outlawed by the Geneva conventions. 67% of the deaths caused in these attacks were by the Saudis and their coalition, with Houthis and their allies responsible for over 16%. 19,990 recorded air raids since the conflict began £770m - the amount of foreign aid given by Britain in food, medicines and other assistance to civilians over the last half a decade.

£6.2bn - the amount of money Britain has earned in the same period selling arms to the Saudis and their coalition partners.

Zero - despite being 527,970 square kilometres, Yemen has no permanent rivers. Just 2.9% of Yemen’s land is considered to be usable arable land.

Four UN weapons experts have arrived in Saudi Arabia, at the invitation of the government, to examine the weapons used in the assault on the two sites at Abqaiq and Khurais. Two of the experts have previous knowledge of the weapons used in the four-year Yemen civil war.

The Saudi government also took representatives from international media to Abqaiq and Khurais to show the extraordinary scale of the damage and assure that the sites would be back to full production capacity within a month or two.

Everything you need to know about the Saudi Arabia oil attacks Read more

Riyadh told reporters that the assaults, a mixture of cruise missiles and drones, came from the direction of Iran and the weaponry deployed is not in the possession of the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia has not identified the precise point from which the attack was launched, but unnamed US intelligence sources claim it was southern Iran, and the attack was undertaken with the knowledge of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said such such claims are false and designed to distract attention from Saudi breaches of humanitarian law in Yemen.

The focus of the dispute is likely to move next week to New York where Zarif is expected to meet European foreign ministers, including the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, at the UN general assembly. The chances of a direct meeting between the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, and Donald Trump is ruled out by Iran, but the French president, Emmanuel Macron, is likely to try to act as a mediator between the two sides since he will hold bilateral meetings with both men.

Seeking a resolution is complicated by the political chaos inside the Saudi-backed Yemen government, as well as a dispute between Yemen and one of its nominal supporters, the United Arab Emirates. In a sign of the collapse of trust, Yemen’s transport minister, Saleh Al-Jubwani, accused the UAE on twitter of supporting al-Qaida in Yemen to undermine the government.

Yemen’s president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, issued a decree on Thursday evening appointing new foreign and finance ministers in a cabinet reshuffle to lead the key state institutions. He appointed the former ambassador Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Al-Hadrami as minister of foreign affairs, replacing Khaled al-Yamani, who resigned last June. He also appointed the fourth head of the Central Bank in as many years.

In London Boris Johnson met the emir of Qatar on Saturday and in a statement from No 10 stressed Downing Street is seeking to de-escalate the crisis through negotiation. It is the second time this week that No 10 has issued statements emphasising a diplomatic as opposed to a military solution to the crisis.