Middle East on edge as US tightens pressure on Iran and Houthis claim attacks on Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s air defences intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by Yemen’s Houthi militia towards the Kingdom’s Eastern Region, the Saudi-led coalition said.

Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki Al-Malki announced the interception.

The UAE National Guard rescued 22 people after a fire broke out aboard a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman.

A Coast Guard unit launched the operation after receiving a distress report from the ship’s crew. Specialised teams located the vessel, reached it and safely evacuated all 22 crew members.

The rescued crew, who were of Arab nationalities, received first aid before being handed over to the relevant authorities. All 22 were reported to be in stable condition.

The National Guard said the operation highlighted its personnel’s readiness to respond to maritime emergencies and their commitment to protecting lives and strengthening maritime security and safety.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan held talks with Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on the latest developments in the Middle East during a phone call on Saturday.

The two ministers discussed ongoing efforts to de-escalate regional tensions and strengthen security and stability, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said in a post on X.

The call marks the second reported conversation between the two ministers in the past week.

Two explosions were heard on Iran’s Qeshm island and other parts of the country’s south, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency and state television reported.

The blasts were linked to activities in the Strait of Hormuz, the reports said, adding that no damage had been reported on the island so far.

CENTCOM says the St Kitts-flagged vessel attempted to breach the naval blockade after visiting an Iranian port.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) forces disabled a commercial cargo vessel in the Gulf of Oman on November 7 after its civilian crew allegedly ignored repeated warnings and attempted to violate the naval blockade against Iran.

A US military aircraft fired precision munitions at the stern of the St Kitts-flagged M/V Huda, disabling the vessel. CENTCOM said the crew had been directed to abandon the targeted areas before the strike. The cargo ship had attempted to leave regional waters after visiting an Iranian port.

Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defence has issued an emergency alert warning of potential danger in the Jazan region through the National Early Warning Platform.

In a post on X, the Civil Defence urged residents to remain calm, follow official instructions and stay indoors. It advised people to move to the nearest safe place, away from windows, until the danger has passed.

Residents were also warned to avoid open areas, stay away from potentially hazardous locations and monitor official channels for further updates.

The US has formally asked Iraq to close all but two of its border crossings with Iran, Iraq's foreign minister has told Al Jazeera.

Washington is threatening to impose sanctions on Iraq if it fails to comply, an Iraqi official said.

The demand comes hours after the US launched 'Task Force Iron Gate', aimed at isolating Iran by land by disrupting its cross-border supply routes.

Houthi media said on Saturday that Saudi strikes killed 27 people, most of them women and children, in Yemen's Sanaa province, as deaths mount in the country's revived civil war.

The United Nations says more than 1,600 people have been killed and more than 300,000 displaced since fighting resumed in the impoverished country.

The death toll from the Saudi-led coalition's strikes on Al Shariya village has risen to 27, most of them women and children, with 36 people wounded, the Houthis' health ministry said in a statement to their Saba news agency.

Saba said earlier on Saturday that operations to recover victims from the rubble were ongoing and that "aircraft targeted paramedics with two strikes".

A Syrian diplomatic source denied to state media on Saturday that Damascus had deployed troops to Yemen to join the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthis.

The source told SANA that reports Syria had sent troops "at this time are entirely unfounded" and that Damascus was focused on domestic matters. Multiple Yemeni sources told AFP on Saturday that Syrian troops were already in both Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis said on Saturday they had launched multiple missile and drone attacks against Saudi troops and infrastructure both in the kingdom and Yemen.

The group, which is fighting a Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen's internationally recognised government, launched six operations that targeted Aramco oil facilities as well as Riyadh airport and Saudi troops and military facilities on both sides of the border, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree posted on X.

The navy of Iran's Army said Saturday that a "violating" oil tanker caught fire earlier in the day after hitting naval mines east of the Strait of Hormuz.

In a statement on the army's website, the navy said the oil tanker had turned off its navigation systems and was transiting the "forbidden and unsafe" region east of the strait, ignoring warnings, when it hit the mines and caught fire.

It warned that the same fate awaits any "violating" vessels that ignore warnings and enter the "forbidden" areas of the waterway, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Thousands of Syrian troops are set to deploy to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with some already on the ground, multiple Yemeni officials told AFP, as Riyadh rallies international help to repel the Houthis and bolster the government in Aden.

Hundreds have already been deployed to both sides of the border, according to three separate Yemeni military sources and a defence official.

But more are coming.

Syria will send around 3,000 troops to join the Saudi-led coalition's fight, a source from the Presidential Leadership Council, Yemen's top governing body, told AFP.

"The Syrian side and the Saudi side agreed to send around 3,000 troops to fight against the Houthis," said the source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The arrangement was greenlit during Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa's visit to Riyadh this week, where the two countries signed cooperation agreements, including a defence deal.

Those already stationed on the Yemeni side of the border at the moment are leading drone operations against the Houthis in the area, one of the military officials told AFP.

The US Department of the Treasury said on Saturday that its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had imposed sanctions on eight Canada-based money services businesses accused of facilitating activities linked to the Iranian regime. The action was taken under Operation Economic Outcast.

In a separate move, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an order effectively cutting cryptocurrency exchange MEXC Global off from the US financial system. The platform is accused of facilitating at least $16 billion in illicit transactions, including those linked to sanctions evasion involving Iran, North Korea and Russia.

The US military has set up a new task force to prevent Iran from using land routes and the Caspian Sea to transport advanced weapons and restricted materials.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Admiral Brad Cooper on Saturday ordered the formation of Task Force Iron Gate, a team of around 20 civilian and military personnel based in Tampa, Florida.

The team will work with other US government agencies to restrict the movement of advanced weapons, dual-use technology, sanctioned materials and illegal revenue across Iran's land borders and the Caspian Sea.

Cooper said the initiative would strengthen Washington's efforts to limit Iran's military supplies and funding.

"Strengthening CENTCOM's collaboration with US interagency partners will further constrain Iran's ability to finance terrorism, rebuild weapons factories, and replenish their military," he said.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Saturday that its aerospace division has established underground missile and drone production facilities and is continuously increasing the range of its missiles.

"We managed to rapidly relocated the production of missiles and drones from the surface to underground (facilities)," IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said at a press conference in Tehran.

"We are constantly enhancing the range of our missiles, and we will not stop in this regard," Mohebbi said, adding all tangible and intangible assets of a "hostile country" are within Iran's reach, Xinhua News Agency reported.

He warned that if the enemy renews strikes, Iran will unveil its military surprises, saying, "We are prepared without any geographical limitation to defend the country's existence, identity, and territorial integrity."

The son of the ousted shah of Iran on Saturday received a "Freedom Prize" in Frankfurt awarded to the Iranian people in a ceremony that critics said was illegitimate.

Some 18,000 demonstrators, many chanting support and waving pre-revolutionary Iranian flags, greeted Reza Pahlavi as he turned up in the German city to be handed the honour, according to a police estimate.

The prize was awarded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, an activist group close to Germany's liberal FDP party.

Iran "is a country not waiting to be taught democracy, this is a country being prevented from practising it", Pahlavi said at St Paul's Church, famous for hosting Germany's first-ever elected parliament in 1848-1849.

"A people ready to die for the right to vote is willing to exercise the right to vote," he added to applause.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it has lifted a self-proclaimed limit of 2,000 kilometers on the range of its ballistic missiles, suggesting the country may seek to develop missiles capable of reaching more distant targets amid fears of renewed all-out war.

The comments by the spokesman of Revolutionary Guard came days after the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, warned that "any kind and level of threat" from the US or Israel would face a response without geographic limits.

Asked at a Tehran press conference about the limit on missile ranges, Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said, "That restriction has been lifted for us."

He did not say whether Iran had missiles capable of exceeding the limit, saying only Iran would "demonstrate these capabilities in practice" rather than make statements.

Iran is not known to have missiles that can go beyond the 2,000-kilometre limit - a range that puts parts of Greece and the Balkans, the entire Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and most of Egypt within reach. However, US officials have said technology from Iran's space program can be repurposed to build intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Iranian military, meanwhile, said a tanker east of the Strait of Hormuz had hit a naval mine and caught fire. It did not identify the nationality or destination of the tanker, which it said had turned off its navigational beacon and was sailing in a "prohibited area."

Two media outlets affiliated with Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis said on Saturday that the death toll in Saudi strikes on Yemen's Sanaa province rose to 22.

"The number of victims of the Saudi enemy warplane massacre in the Al-Shariya area... has risen to 22 citizens, most of them children and women, while the number of wounded has risen to 30," the Houthis' Saba news agency said, with the group's Al-Masirah TV reporting the same toll.

Houthi media said on Saturday that Saudi strikes killed 11 people, including women and children, in Yemen's Sanaa province, following the return of the country's dormant civil war.

"Martyrdom of 11 citizens, among them women and children, in Saudi enemy airstrikes" on homes in the Al-Shariyah area of Sanaa province, the Iran-backed Houthis' Saba news agency said, adding that operations to recover victims from the rubble were ongoing and that "aircraft targeted paramedics with two strikes".

Iran executed a man on Saturday convicted of being involved in a deadly assault on a police station, the judiciary said.

"The death sentence of Mohammad Aref Shahbakhsh -- an operative linked to the terrorist group Jaish al-Zolm (al-Adl) -- was carried out this morning following the completion of all legal procedures," the judiciary's Mizan Online website reported.

Jaish al-Adl is an outlawed militant group in Sistan-Baluchistan province, one of Iran's poorest, which has long seen clashes between security forces and armed groups, including Sunni militants and members of the ethnic Baloch minority.

US Mission to UAE issued a warning for Americans. It tweeted: "Americans currently in the Middle East should exercise heightened vigilance due to the increased threat of armed attacks by Iranian-supported Houthis and Iranian efforts to target US government officials in the region. Be aware of potential flight cancellations, airspace closures, and travel disruptions."

US President Donald Trump has described the ongoing confrontation with Iran as "not a war", claiming that Washington has made significant progress in dealing with Tehran and is currently extracting more oil than before the hostilities.

"We made a lot of progress with Iran. We’re taking out more oil now than we were before the war. It’s not a war. It can’t be a war when for five months nobody was hurt, killed, or anything else. It’s not a war," Donald Trump said.

These assertions come amid persistent ambiguity regarding the trajectory of the US military campaign targeting Iran, alongside ongoing deliberations concerning fresh air strikes. His contention that current tensions do not constitute a war persists despite White House deliberations regarding active military options, while broader friction with Tehran remains a primary regional concern.

In the space of about 24 hours, US President Donald Trump suggested cutting off aid to Israel, a staunch critic of Israel won a key Senate race and the vice president partly blamed his own party's landslide defeat on US-Israel relations.

The rupture caused by Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza and the jointly launched war with Iran has shredded bipartisan US support for Israel that goes back decades. Democrats are fiercely divided over Israel, and Republicans are increasingly critical of its actions.

In Israel, critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuse him of having mismanaged relations with the country’s closest ally. But the divide runs much deeper, and is likely to persist even if a new government is formed after last week’s elections.

On the left, Americans increasingly see Israel as an international pariah because of the war in Gaza and violent settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. On the right, some see Israel as having undermined Trump’s “America First” pledge, accusing it of dragging the US into a costly and unnecessary war with Iran.

“Something fundamental has shifted,” said Michael Oren, a historian and former Israeli ambassador to the US. “My working assumption is that the call to cut off military aid is just the beginning.”

Colonel Turki Al-Malki, the Official Spokesman for the Coalition Forces tweeted an update, writing: "Intercepted and destroyed a cruise missile launched by the Houthi terrorist militia toward the Riyadh area."

US President Donald Trump said the US military on Friday carried out new limited strikes on Iran, targeting an Iranian air defence system.

Iranian state media reported the sound of two explosions in the Suza area of Qeshm Island, which is in the crucial waterway for oil shipments.

Trump in an exchange with reporters described the military action as “minor."

“They knocked out — they built a little bit of an anti-aircraft device and we knocked it out in about 15 minutes, maybe five," Trump told reporters shortly after arriving in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday evening.

Trump did not offer further details about the target.

Iran's military is "stronger" and more motivated than it was when the United States and Israel started the war in February, Iranian state media reported on Saturday, citing an army spokesman.

"Today, the Islamic Republic's armed forces... having gained experience from direct confrontation with the United States and the Israeli regime, are on higher alert and are stronger than they were at the beginning of the war. They now possess greater motivation, commitment, and self-confidence," Mohammad Akraminia said, according to the state news agency IRNA.

The United States is offering a $20 million reward "and possible relocation" for information about Iran's nuclear programme, the military said on Friday, despite President Donald Trump's repeated claims that it has been obliterated.

A State Department program, Rewards for Justice, "is offering a reward of up to $20 million and possible relocation for information about Iran's nuclear programme, including its facilities, equipment, and associated personnel, such as those in the scientific community," US Central Command said in a statement posted on X.

Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis are effectively policing maritime transit of the Red Sea through a system under which vessels can request safe passage via email, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Houthis — who control swaths of Yemen — declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia earlier this year, after which some ships began contacting them before transiting the Red Sea, the Journal reported.

If the Houthis reply, they typically do so within 24 hours, the newspaper said, citing crew member accounts and emails it reviewed.

Day 250: Trump warns Iran of ‘heavy hit’ as Tehran steps up Gulf diplomacy

Day 249: Oman and Iran call for end to war and fresh dialogue

Day 248: US VP Vance says Iran war is 'the reason we lost' midterms

Day 247: US strikes Iran's Qeshm island

Day 246: Trump threatens Iran with military action

Day 246: UAE hopes for peace, ‘braced for worst’

Day 245: Rubio says US yet to decide on new Iran strikes

Day 244: US denies Iran destroyed sea drone in Strait of Hormuz

Day 243: US fires senior army general in latest ouster: reports