Saudi Arabia urges ‘maximum restraint’ after Israeli strike on Houthi infrastructure in Yemen

Saudi Arabia, a major foreign player in Yemen’s nearly decade-long civil war, urges restraint in the wake of an Israeli strike that the Houthi rebels said killed 6 people. The strike came in response to a Houthi drone strike in Tel Aviv on Thursday night in which one person was killed.

The Israeli strike “aggravates the current tension in the region and halts the ongoing efforts to end the war in Gaza,” the Saudi foreign ministry says in a statement.

It “called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to distance the region and its people from the dangers of war.”

Saudi Arabia mobilized an international military coalition against the Houthis in 2015, although a truce has largely held for the past two years.

Efforts by the kingdom to broker a Yemen peace deal have faltered in the wake of an anti-shipping campaign by the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which the Iran-backed group claims is being carried out to signal solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza amid Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group, also backed by Iran.

The rebels have targeted nearly 90 ships since November.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has engaged in a delicate balancing act as the world’s biggest oil exporter tries to extricate itself from the war on its doorstep.

It has not joined a US-led naval coalition to deter Houthi attacks or participated in strikes on Yemen carried out by the US and Britain since January.

Sunday’s foreign ministry statement affirmed the kingdom’s “continuous support for peace efforts in Yemen to spare its people more suffering.”

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