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US President Donald Trump said Washington was considering joining Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis after an attack on Riyadh’s international airport killed at least 12 people and wounded 309, exposing vulnerabilities in the kingdom’s air defences.
“We may. We're going to look at it. We just found out about the recent attack, so we'll make a decision. We move very quickly,” Reuters reported Trump telling reporters outside the White House when asked whether the United States would join Saudi strikes against the Houthis.
The Saudi civil aviation authority said Saturday’s attack was the third targeting King Khalid International Airport this week. The dead included four Saudis, two Bangladeshis and one national each from the United States, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Egypt.
Hospitals were inundated with casualties arriving by ambulance and helicopter, with some victims in critical condition, according to people briefed on the matter.
The latest strike was the deadliest in Saudi Arabia in more than a decade and reportedly occurred without an alert from the country’s threat warning system.
The two earlier attacks on the airport had killed four people and caused extensive damage to a Saudi commercial aircraft parked on the tarmac.
All flights were diverted from Riyadh on Saturday, temporarily suspending operations at the airport serving a city of about eight million people. Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed flights to the Saudi capital being cancelled or diverted.
The US embassy in Riyadh said it was “aware of attacks” and “strongly recommends all US citizens avoid this airport and surrounding areas”.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the strikes, saying they “demonstrate a blatant disregard for innocent civilian life”.
A Saudi-led military coalition vowed to retaliate, as the attacks intensified pressure on the kingdom while it supports a Yemeni government offensive against the Houthis.
An eyewitness at the airport told Reuters they saw an explosion followed by several people lying injured on the ground. More than a dozen ambulances were seen heading towards the facility, while a video verified by Reuters showed emergency vehicles at the airport.
An injured traveller told Reuters they had seen an object flying across the sky before part of the ceiling near a departure gate collapsed.
The Houthi media office chief said on X after the attack that the group had “shut down Riyadh international airport”. The Houthis have urged airliners to avoid Saudi airspace, declaring it a military operations zone after the Saudi-backed Yemeni government launched an offensive against them on Monday.
Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government have claimed hundreds of strikes against targets in Houthi-held territory. The Houthis have said the attacks killed civilians, including women and children. Reuters could not independently verify those claims.
Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s war in 2015 at the head of an Arab coalition seeking to drive the Houthis from the capital, Sanaa, which the group seized the previous year.
The conflict reached a bloody stalemate, with hundreds of thousands of Yemenis killed by fighting and famine, before Riyadh reached an agreement with the Houthis in 2022 that largely froze hostilities.
That ceasefire unravelled over the summer, culminating in a Houthi advance that wrested control of the Red Sea chokepoint of Bab el-Mandeb from Saudi-backed government forces.
The Yemeni government launched a new offensive this week to retake the territory, making limited progress as the Houthis placed the country’s third-largest city, Taiz, under siege.
The latest airport attacks have also disrupted travel ahead of major energy and investment conferences scheduled in Riyadh. Several airlines had already suspended or cancelled services to the Saudi capital following earlier strikes, although conference organisers said before Saturday’s attack that the events would proceed as planned. - October 11, 2026
