Saudi Arabia has intercepted a ballistic missile that the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels claimed to have fired at an Aramco facility, Saudi state television reports.
Houthi-run media outlet Almasirah reported on Tuesday that the rebels in Yemen fired a ballistic missile at Aramco in Asir, days after they had fired a similar missile targeting the Saudi Air Force base in the area.
Aramco's facilities are operating normally and are safe, an official at the Saudi oil giant told Reuters, after the first reports of the Houthi missile attack emerged.
"Our facilities are safe and are operating normally," the official at Aramco told Reuters.
The Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, who have been fighting the Saudi-led Arab coalition in Yemen since 2015, have fired or claimed to have fired many missiles on Saudi Arabia since 2015, but they have caused little damage, and many of those missiles have been reportedly intercepted by the Saudi military.
In one of the latest ballistic missile attacks on Aramco from Yemen, a missile was fired in May at an Aramco facility in the Jizan province, the latest in a string of escalating tensions between the Houthis and the Kingdom. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said that Saudi air defense forces had tracked the missile as it landed in the middle of an uninhabited desert.
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In recent months, Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia have intensified as has the antagonism between the two archrivals and leaders of the proxy war in Yemen-Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In April, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles over Riyadh, in retaliation for air raids by a Saudi-led coalition. The Royal Saudi Air Defense intercepted at least one ballistic missile over Riyadh in that attack.
At the end of May, the Saudi-led Arab military coalition destroyed two boats of the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels threatening a commercial oil tanker in the Red Sea, the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) state news agency WAM reported.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More