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A sharp escalation of cross-border attacks by Yemen’s Houthi movement targeting key Saudi infrastructure has triggered sweeping new travel warnings from Western governments, as diplomatic efforts emerge to de-escalate spiraling regional violence linked to the broader post-February 28 US-Israeli military campaign against Iran.

The violence began with a devastating Houthi strike on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport Saturday that left at least 13 people dead and more than 300 injured, marking the deadliest attack on a Gulf Cooperation Council nation since the US-Israeli offensive on Iran launched last month. A second assault on the same airport Sunday killed an additional person and wounded 11 more, making it the third attack on the critical air hub in just seven days. Earlier strikes had already claimed four lives and damaged a commercial Saudi passenger plane.

Officials with Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation released a full breakdown of the Saturday attack’s fatalities, revealing victims from 11 nations: four Saudi citizens, two Bangladeshis, one American, one Egyptian, one Jordanian, one Syrian, one Palestinian and one Sudanese.

Within hours of the Sunday attack, the UK Foreign Office updated its official travel guidance to impose sweeping restrictions. The agency now advises British nationals against all non-essential travel to a wide swathe of Saudi territory, including all of the country’s airports with the sole exception of Medina International Airport, as well as Aseer province, Riyadh province, Najran province, Jizan province, and the major cities of Taif, Jeddah and Dammam. A full ban on all travel remains in place for areas within 10 kilometers of the Saudi-Yemen border. In a highly unusual move, British authorities also explicitly warned UK citizens against attempting to depart Saudi Arabia via any domestic airport, instead advising travelers seeking to exit the country to arrange overland travel to neighboring nations and fly out from international hubs there.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree doubled down on the group’s targeting strategy, issuing a direct warning to international travelers, commercial airlines and global shipping companies to avoid using most Saudi airports and airspace. He confirmed Houthi forces carried out the coordinated strikes on King Khalid International Airport Saturday, saying the attacks successfully disrupted air traffic and forced a full closure of the facility. Saree added that King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, an Aramco-operated fuel station and a Saudi Eastern Province refinery were also targeted in the recent wave of operations. Only the airports serving Mecca and Medina were explicitly excluded from Houthi targeting threats.

The latest wave of attacks represents a major escalation in the long-running conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-aligned Houthi movement, coming amid a renewed Saudi-led military offensive against the group in Yemen. In a statement, UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting condemned the Saturday airport attack as a “dangerous escalation” and “completely contemptible action.”

Yemen has also seen a corresponding uptick in airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition. Local Sanaa-based media outlets report recent air raids targeted the Hamdan district of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, the al-Zurbi Road area of Taiz’s Hayfan district, and the border al-Dhaher district of Saada province. No casualties have been reported from the retaliatory strikes to date.

Washington has also followed London in issuing urgent warnings for its citizens. The US State Department urged American travelers to exercise “extreme caution” when using any major Saudi airports, noting that US government personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia now require special official authorization to access King Khalid International Airport, Jeddah Airport and Dammam Airport. The agency also warned US citizens to prepare for potential flight cancellations, unexpected airspace closures and widespread travel disruptions across the kingdom.

Amid the rapidly escalating violence, diplomatic moves to facilitate a political resolution have begun. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held a telephone call with his Saudi counterpart Faisal bin Farhan to discuss the crisis. According to Iranian state media, Araghchi emphasized that Tehran remains prepared to mediate dialogue between Saudi Arabia and Yemeni stakeholders, and expressed deep concern over the rising tensions. “A military approach and ignoring a political solution will only further complicate the current situation,” Araghchi said, adding that “the crises in this region have no military solution” and that Iran stands ready to provide all necessary support to advance a negotiated political settlement.

This independent report is part of ongoing coverage from Middle East Eye, which specializes in original reporting on the Middle East and North Africa region.

On Sunday, a high-profile British foreign correspondent became the latest international reporter to face entry restrictions from Israeli authorities, in a trend that press freedom organizations warn is part of a growing clampdown on journalists critical of Israeli policy. Secunder Kermani, foreign affairs correspondent for UK-based Channel 4 News who has reported extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years, announced the initial ban shortly after landing at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv in a public post on social media platform X.

Kermani had traveled to Israel to report ahead of the country’s upcoming national elections when he was notified of the entry denial by border officials. In an update posted shortly after the announcement, he confirmed that Israeli authorities had reversed their original decision following a short period of immigration detention. “Thank you for all the messages of support,” Kermani wrote. “After a very brief stay in immigration detention, the decision has been reversed and I have now been allowed to enter Israel. Grateful to all those who offered their help. Concerned to hear other journalists have faced similar issues in recent weeks.”

While Israeli officials have not publicly stated a clear reason for the initial ban, the incident comes after Kermani published a series of high-impact investigative reports that have drawn criticism from pro-Israel circles. Last October, he published an investigation into Bnei David academy, a prominent Jewish religious school whose alumni include many of Israel’s most senior military commanders. The investigation exposed how the institution promotes radicalization among future Israeli soldiers, including through religious teachings that justify the killing of Palestinian men, women, children and infants during the ongoing war in Gaza. Kermani also recorded academy leaders openly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Beyond the Gaza war, his reporting has also documented escalating violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, and cases of rape and sexual abuse against Palestinian captives held by Israeli forces.

Kermani’s case is far from isolated. Press freedom monitors have documented a steady erosion of journalistic safety and access in Israeli-controlled territory over recent years, a crisis that has hit Palestinian journalists hardest of all. According to the Gaza Government Media Office, 263 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that began in October 2023. Israel has also maintained a near-total ban on foreign journalists entering the besieged enclave to report on the ground, blocking independent coverage of the humanitarian crisis unfolding there.

Increasingly, even international journalists from Western countries who once counted on diplomatic protection for their work are facing pushback from Israeli authorities for critical reporting. A June 2026 investigation by the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded at least six separate cases of European journalists being denied entry to Israel or having their travel authorization revoked over the preceding 12 months. In multiple instances, Israeli authorities explicitly cited the journalists’ critical reporting or public statements about Israeli policy as the justification for the restrictions.

Just one day before Kermani’s entry ban incident, press freedom organizations across the globe condemned another attack on a journalist in the occupied Palestinian territories. On October 9, 2026, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, and four major French journalist unions issued a joint statement condemning an attack on AFP photographer Jaafar Ishtayeh near the West Bank town of Aqraba. IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger condemned what he called “the complicity of Israeli forces in allowing settlers to assault Palestinian journalists with impunity.”

In the southern Myanmar city of Hpa-An, young able-bodied residents have adopted a life-or-death rule: never stay out after dark. For 26-year-old tuk-tuk driver Zaw Min, the need to put food on his family’s table overrides the daily terror he lives with. “I worry constantly, but I have no choice but to go out to work,” he told the BBC, requesting anonymity to protect his safety. “My family checks in on me all the time, warning me not to take passengers too far, to watch who I get in the car with. I have to stay on guard every single minute. Everyone here is terrified. People I know have just been taken.”

Local accounts confirm that plainclothes agents and supporters of Myanmar’s ruling military junta are patrolling residential and commercial areas, arbitrarily snatching people between their late teens and 30s to force them into military service. Confidential leaked documents obtained by BBC Burmese confirm that junta authorities have been ordered to aggressively meet strict recruitment quotas across every administrative jurisdiction, a desperate push to refill military ranks depleted by three years of brutal civil war against ethnic militias, pro-democracy activists and civilian-led resistance movements.

Myanmar has been mired in bloody conflict since February 2021, when the military staged a coup that ousted the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Three years on, the junta has been battered by humiliating battlefield losses, plummeting troop morale, and soaring desertion rates. In response, it enacted a sweeping mandatory conscription law: all men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 are required to serve a minimum of two years in the military, with refusal carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison. For former junta officer Maj Naung Yoe, now a military affairs official with the anti-coup Myanmar Defense and Security Institute (MDSI), this law stands as one of the harshest actions the junta has taken against civilians since seizing power.

Since early 2024, an estimated 100,000 young people have been swept into the junta’s conscription dragnet, with many of them brought into service through coercion, extortion and outright abduction. “Security forces monitor young people’s movements to arrest them, force them into service under the cover of military eligibility rules, extort bribes by threatening detention, and snatch people during routine guest list checks at public venues,” Naung Yoe explained. When the BBC contacted the junta’s Central Body for Summoning People’s Military Servants to comment on allegations of forced conscription and abductions, the body declined to issue any response.

While the new conscription system has created a steady stream of new bodies for the junta’s armed forces – a reinforcement that observers say has helped the regime retake lost territory and push resistance groups onto the defensive – the practice has also grown increasingly extreme as more young people go to great lengths to avoid being drafted, either to join the opposition or simply refuse to fight their fellow citizens.

International human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights have all documented the junta’s pattern of abducting civilian civilians and forcing them into military service. In July 2025, open-source research group Myanmar Witness published an analysis of hundreds of missing person notices posted to Facebook between 2021 and 2025, finding that missing person reports for January jumped from just four in 2021, before the coup, to 82 in 2025, after the conscription law came into force. The organization concluded that most junta recruitment happens through detention, coercion and forced disappearance rather than formal legal call-ups, and families are often given no notice of their loved ones’ fates. Men and teenage boys make up the vast majority of those reported missing.

The human cost of this system is laid bare in the story of Ma Moe San Pan, a Yangon resident whose 33-year-old husband Phyo Wai was abducted for conscription in May 2025. After a domestic argument, Phyo Wai left their home, and Ma Moe San Pan asked her cousin, who worked at the local ward administration office, to help bring him back. Two days later, she received a call from Phyo Wai, who was being held at a military recruitment center across the city. According to Ma Moe San Pan, her cousin had sold Phyo Wai to another ward for 4 million kyat (approximately $900 USD) to help that ward meet its recruitment quota. In a subsequent attempt to secure her husband’s release, she was scammed out of an additional 4.5 million kyat by fraudsters who falsely promised they could free him.

When contacted by the BBC, the administrator of the ward that took possession of Phyo Wai admitted that transfers of recruits between townships happen when local wards cannot meet their quotas, but he denied any money changed hands in Phyo Wai’s case. Ma Moe San Pan filed a police complaint over the illegal conscription and the subsequent scam, but police refused to add human trafficking charges to her report, claiming such charges could only be filed if the person was sold across an international border. She has had no information about her husband’s whereabouts since he was taken.

Ma Moe San Pan’s case exposes how pressure to meet recruitment quotas from junta leadership has spawned a corrupt illicit market for eligible recruits across Myanmar. Low-level officials, security personnel and criminal gangs have adopted increasingly ruthless tactics to find recruits: ambushing commuters at road checkpoints, luring young people with fake job postings, and breaking into homes to abduct eligible residents. Naung Yoe argues that the conscription system, operating under the cover of law, has effectively become a modern-day human trafficking network. In one high-profile case from August 2025, Yangon police arrested a senior Fire Services Department official and his son-in-law for abducting four young men, luring them with false job promises and holding them in custom-built cells in his home to sell them to military recruiters. The official faces up to seven years in prison on kidnapping charges.

Naung Yoe explains that the system disproportionately harms the poor, while wealthy people can simply pay to avoid conscription, paying brokers to find vulnerable substitute recruits to take their place. “These corrupt practices are growing more common because it is getting harder every month to meet recruitment quotas, and the profits from trading recruits are extremely lucrative for those on the ground,” he said.

The brutal push for conscription also reveals the junta’s underlying desperation for manpower after years of devastating losses on the battlefield. Dr. Sandeep Singh, a military studies researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, notes that this latest conscription drive is another clear sign of how embattled the junta remains in Myanmar’s civil war. “This system has placed unbearable additional pressure on Myanmar’s young people and their families, who have already endured four years of unrelenting conflict,” he said.

Beyond the immediate human cost, the constant threat of abduction for conscription has triggered mass internal displacement, created severe labor shortages across Myanmar’s already struggling economy, and pushed tens of thousands of people to flee across the border into neighboring countries. Three and a half years after seizing power, the junta has turned conscription into a tool to subjugate the civilian population and force citizens to fight their fellow countrymen, observers say. As the MDSI stated in a June 2025 statement: “The generals have profited from using military law to turn Myanmar’s citizens against each other.”