Riyadh's main airport will stay closed until Saturday, 17 October, Saudi authorities said, after a week of Houthi missile and drone strikes forced airlines to scrap flights and left the capital's airspace largely empty.
A Notice to Airmen put the reopening of King Khalid International Airport at 9pm GMT on 17 October, according to The Straits Times. The facility, second only to Jeddah in traffic, has been shut since Saturday, when a missile hit Terminal 3 and killed 13 people. More than 300 were wounded, CNA reported, making it the deadliest attack inside the kingdom in over a decade.
The Saudi civil aviation authority said flights were halted so that staff could complete checks on the safety and operational readiness of airport facilities. France 24 reported that the Saudi-led coalition was responding to the combined drone and missile attacks.
A second strike followed on Sunday. A Pakistani resident died when a projectile struck Terminal 4, the General Authority of Civil Aviation said, in an account carried by BBC News. Dammam's King Fahd International Airport was hit the same evening, with no casualties reported.
At the WPC Energy Congress in Riyadh, Saudi energy minister Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman said the attacks required a proportionate answer. "The events of recent weeks are serious. Our response must be equally serious," he told delegates, BBC News reported.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said in a recorded statement that his group had launched missiles and drones at the airports in Riyadh and Dammam and at two oil and gas sites in Eastern Province. He framed the operation as retaliation for 124 Saudi air raids on Yemen in the preceding day, according to BBC News.
In a video published by CBC News, the second strike on the airport and the rising toll are examined alongside the wider escalation.
Flightradar24 data showed aircraft routing around Riyadh on Monday, while other jets continued to cross Saudi airspace and land at Jeddah. Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, put cancellations at Saudi airports at 46.4%, The Straits Times reported.
Lufthansa Group has dropped all Riyadh flights through 16 October. Air France-KLM will not serve the city again before the end of the month, and Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi has also prolonged its suspensions. Delta Air Lines pushed its planned Atlanta-Riyadh launch from 23 October to March 2027, as GlobeTV reported on Monday.
Euronews reported on the Houthi claim of responsibility and the growing death toll from the weekend attacks, in the video below.
Mark Zee, who founded the aviation safety group OPSGROUP, said the campaign against civilian aviation had no recent parallel. "This level of sustained intense attack on civil aviation is unprecedented," he said. He advised carriers to reassess the risk and send Europe-Asia traffic over central Asia rather than the southern Middle East corridor.
The Straits Times also reported that Saudi real GDP is forecast to shrink by 3.6% in 2026, with weaker oil activity among the causes. October events in Riyadh, including the kingdom's flagship investment conference, are under pressure from the disruption.