Attack at Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport Kills 12 Including U.S. Citizen; Trump Says U.S. "May" Join Saudi-Led Strikes

According to AFP and France 24, a Saudi civil aviation official announced on Saturday that an attack on Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport killed at least 12 people and injured 309, with some of the wounded in serious condition and the final death toll likely to rise. The Saudi Ministry of Health unusually activated a mass call-up of doctors to deal with a "serious emergency." Two doctors told AFP that the wounded included several pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

The dead include 4 Saudi citizens as well as nationals from Bangladesh, the United States, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan. A diplomatic source attributed the attack to a missile fired by Yemen's Houthi forces. The Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation has suspended operations at the airport, and the damage is still being assessed. A passenger waiting at Gate 403 recalled to AFP: "I saw 401 get hit, there were people injured right in front of me, everyone was running."

The Saudi-led international coalition has been backing government forces on the Yemeni battlefield since 2015, and this strike is the latest escalation in the continued spillover of that war. Since the collapse of a UN-brokered four-year ceasefire in July of this year — even as broader Middle Eastern fighting has dragged on for months — the Iran-backed Houthis have carried out "unprecedented-scale" attacks on Saudi Arabia, targeting airports, oil facilities and tankers. Yemeni government forces last week announced a counteroffensive aimed at retaking areas captured by the Houthis around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the previous month — a critical maritime corridor for Red Sea oil and cargo traffic. The Houthis claim to have repelled the offensive. Claims from all belligerents are difficult to verify independently, and journalists' access to the war zone is restricted.

On this Saturday, with the death toll listing citizens of eight countries, the scales over whether to intervene shifted in Washington. U.S. President Trump had previously been reported to have refused Saudi requests for military assistance against the Houthis, but at the White House on this day he reversed course: "We may." He added: "We just learned about this attack, and we will make a decision."

The U.S., Canadian, German and Spanish embassies in Saudi Arabia have all advised their citizens to avoid the airport. A senior Western diplomat told AFP that multiple embassies have barred their staff from using the airport "for the coming week."

Anna Jacobs, an analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute, warned: "What is certain is that we are climbing a very dangerous staircase." Hours after the Riyadh attack, a spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition said on X that a "projectile" had landed near King Fahd International Airport in the eastern city of Dammam; in the early hours of Sunday, the same spokesperson said the coalition had intercepted a missile in the southeastern part of the capital. The Houthis had not immediately claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack at the time it occurred, but had claimed a previous round of attacks earlier in the week, saying they had killed three people and damaged one aircraft.