Yemeni army forces, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, have fired a domestically-designed and -developed ballistic missile at a strategic economic target in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border region of Jizan in retaliation to the Riyadh regime’s devastating military aggression against their impoverished country.

A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the short-range Badr-1 missile struck Jazan Economic City, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, with great precision early on Friday, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.

The development came a day after Yemeni forces fired a Badr-1 missile at al-Anad air base in the southwestern province of Lahij, leaving scores of Saudi-backed militiamen loyal to Yemen's resigned president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, dead and injured.

Also on Friday, more than a dozen Saudi mercenaries were killed and injured as Yemeni snipers and their allies carried out separate operations across the country.

People inspect the site of a Saudi airstrike in Sa’ada, Yemen, on May 10, 2018. (Photo by Reuters)

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the Saudi-led war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured since March 2015.

The United Nations says a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.

A high-ranking UN aid official recently warned against the “catastrophic” living conditions in Yemen, stating that there was a growing risk of famine and cholera there.

A malnourished Yemeni child awaits treatment at a hospital in the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah on May 7, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

“People's lives have continued unraveling. Conflict has escalated since November driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes,” John Ging, UN director of aid operations, told the UN Security Council on February 27.

Ging said cholera had infected 1.1 million people in Yemen since last April, and a new outbreak of diphtheria had occurred in the war-ravaged Arab country since 1982.