Saudi Arabia said Wednesday that its air defenses intercepted and destroyed a Houthi drone before it could enter the airspace over Mecca, with the Iran-backed Houthi militia group rejecting the claim as "an worn-out lie," as fighting reaches the holy city for the first time in the ongoing conflict.
Turki al-Malki, spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition which has battled the Houthis since 2015, described the attack as "a deliberate act intended to provoke the feelings of millions of Muslims," and said the holy city's security is a "red line."
Mecca is Islam's holiest site and the focal point of the annual Hajj pilgrimage.
The Houthis rejected the Saudi statement, with spokesperson Hazem al-Assad saying: "The claims about targeting Mecca are a worn-out lie that has been used before and no longer fools anyone."
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, meanwhile, condemned the strike as a "heinous" attack, denouncing what it described as Houthi attacks on Mecca and the Madinah region alongside the group's "ongoing aggression" against Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia issued a security alert in Mecca on Tuesday, the first since the Houthis last attempted to target the sacred area with a ballistic missile in 2017, after days of intensified attacks that have drawn Saudi Arabia deeper into the Mideast war.
The incident marks the latest escalation in the conflict in Yemen, that is testing a month-old defense pact among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, and adding a new flashpoint to a Middle East already destabilized by the U.S.-Iran conflict.
A United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022 largely halted Houthi attacks on Saudi territory, but hostilities have escalated again since the group declared a blockade on Saudi shipping in July and gained control of critical nodes on the country's Bab al-Mandeb coastline.
In early September, the Iran-aligned group launched missiles and drones at sites across Saudi Arabia, marking a drastic escalation in the fighting. Riyadh has accused the Houthi rebels of launching attacks on civilian and economic sites in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia has also blamed a pro-Iranian militia based in Iraq for Friday's attack that knocked out the East-West Pipeline, one of the kingdom's most important oil conduits across the Arabian desert, putting 4 million barrels per day at risk and driven a sharp spike in crude prices.
The broadening conflict has further rattled oil markets already on edge over the constrained Gulf shipping routes, from a shuttered Saudi pipeline to swings in Strait of Hormuz traffic.
Oil prices have climbed alongside the escalation, even as Hormuz flows have been climbing back.
While oil was trading lower Wednesday, Brent crude and U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures hovered near four-month highs of $107.8 per barrel and $104.6 a barrel, respectively.
The seven-day average of oil transit through the Hormuz Strait rose to nearly 12 million barrels per day as of Sunday — "easily the fastest pace since the post-MOU June-July breakout," according to oil market analyst and founder of research house Commodity Context, Rory Johnston.
"This time there's virtually no Iranian crude," he said. Still, that volume remains less than 60% of pre-war levels, Johnston added, underscoring the room shipping through the strait has left to recover as the Yemen fighting and the pipeline outage add fresh risk onto an already-strained supply picture.
