Yemen’s Ansar Allah group, known as the Houthis, said on Tuesday that it had struck Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura oil refinery, the kingdom’s largest.
The group’s military spokesperson, Yahya Saree, said a ballistic missile ignited a fire at the Gulf‑side facility, west of the Strait of Hormuz, though Saudi authorities have not confirmed the attack.
The Houthis have intensified strikes on Saudi territory since Riyadh hit Sanaa’s international airport in July, breaking a ceasefire and opening another front in the wider US-Israeli war on Iran.
Saudi Arabia sends almost all its oil exports through two main ports: Ras Tanura on the Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea. The Houthis have previously attacked Yanbu.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing a source familiar with the matter, that Saudi Arabia had contained a fire near the Ras Tanura oil terminal earlier that day.
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Separately, Saudi‑backed Yemeni forces said they had carried out 1,276 operations against Houthi positions in the past 24 hours as part of their “Dawn of Yemen” offensive.
Military spokesperson Colonel Majed al‑Nuzaili said the operations had “neutralised” about 382 Houthi commanders and fighters, without specifying how many were killed or wounded.
He added that the forces had destroyed or damaged 140 military vehicles and heavy weapons, as well as several arms and ammunition depots, and had struck Houthi command centres, defensive positions, reinforcements and supply routes across several fronts.
The US Embassy in Riyadh has told non-emergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia due to safety risks, an order first issued on 23 October.
In a statement on X, the embassy warned of possible further attacks on airports, airspace closures, flight cancellations and travel disruption.
'US inability to provide security'
In Iran, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei met Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei on Tuesday, state media reported. Khamenei has not appeared in public since succeeding his father, Ali Khamenei, who Israeli-US forces assassinated on 28 February.
Rezaei’s meeting followed talks on Monday with members of the Mecca Alliance - Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin - as regional states are seeking to end the war.
“Washington’s inability to provide security guarantees has become evident,” Rezaei wrote on X on Tuesday.
“Security in West Asia must originate from within the region itself, and any foreign intervention must be prevented.”
On Monday, at a campaign rally in Corinth, Mississippi, US President Donald Trump defended the war as he faced poor opinion polls ahead of elections that could cost Republicans control of both houses of Congress. He repeated a Republican lawmaker’s false claim that “we didn’t start the war with Iran. Iran started the war with us”.
Trump also defended the war’s economic effects, saying he had expected oil prices to rise much higher.
“I was fully prepared to do it because we really had no choice. Should’ve been done a long time ago,” he said.
Trump said he had never supported ceasefire earlier in the year.
“We did a little ceasefire, which I never liked very much,” he said. “We wanna be nice, but it was just a waste of time as far as I’m concerned.”
He added that Iran had developed missiles capable of reaching Europe and potentially targeting US cities.
'An unstable regional system has been constructed on the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf'
- Badr al-Busaidi, Omani foreign minister
On Tuesday, Abdollah Haji Sadeghi, Iran supreme leader’s representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Tehran knew “the enemy’s vulnerabilities”. He warned that further US attacks would draw a “harsher and more devastating” response, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
Sadeghi said “the enemy” had wrongly assumed that assassinating Iranian leaders and military commanders would turn public opinion against the government.
After failing militarily, he said, “the enemy” was now using psychological warfare to create “despair, stoking divisions, and casting doubt on resistance”.
Speaking in Cambridge during a diplomatic visit to the UK, Oman's Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi called on Gulf states to form a non-aggression pact with Iran, and end the region's reliance on a failed US security umbrella.
"Instead of a genuine security structure designed to maintain stable relations between the eight states of the Gulf, an unstable regional system has been constructed on the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf," al-Busaidi said.
"There is no such fundamental antagonism. There are problems, yes, of course. But the plain fact is that Arabs and Persians have lived in peace around the Gulf for centuries."
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