Yemeni forces fire missile at Jizan Airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia

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 for 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 Jizan Airport, also known as King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Airport, with great precision on Thursday afternoon, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.

The development came only a day after Yemeni forces attacked an oil refinery of the Saudi Arabian national petroleum and natural gas company, Aramco, in the kingdom’s capital Riyadh using a long-endurance Sammad-2 (Invincible-2) unmanned aerial vehicle.

Also on Thursday, eight people lost their lives and five others, including women and children, sustained injuries when Saudi warplanes conducted an airstrike against a house in the al-Seifi area of Sahar district in Yemen’s mountainous northwestern province of Sa’ada.

Yemeni troops and their allied forces also launched a short-range missile at a gathering of Saudi-sponsored militiamen loyal to former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in an area of the country’s western coastal province of Hudaydah.

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 has warned against the “catastrophic” living conditions in Yemen, stating that there was a growing risk of famine and cholera there.

“The 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.