saudi.info

Sunday's record from the Saudi side is unusually complete. The coalition said it intercepted two ballistic missiles aimed at Khamis Mushait, two drones over the Riyadh region and a third over the Eastern Province; Civil Defence said a projectile struck a residential site in Najran, injuring six Saudi citizens and damaging three homes and three vehicles, and attributed it to the Houthis. Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki said separately that an AH-6i reconnaissance helicopter crashed in the Najran region, killing both crew, "because of a technical malfunction"; the Houthis claimed to have shot down an Apache near Najran, which the coalition rejected. On the other side of the line, Al-Masirah reported 13 killed and 29 wounded in Taiz and Saada on Saturday from what it called Saudi air strikes, shelling and sniper fire, a figure no one outside the Houthi system has verified.

The front that is actually moving is Taiz. Yemen's military said government troops made gains there on Sunday and claimed 12 Houthi fighters killed in the south of the governorate; government-aligned commanders said eight soldiers died in Lahij on Saturday; the Houthis fired missiles toward Marib. The siege arithmetic is what the coalition's air campaign has not changed: IOM counts more than 233,000 displaced, 121,000 of them in Taiz, the WHO says the city's 12 hospitals had fuel for four days and no surgical supplies, Al Jazeera's correspondent reports cooking gas gone and food prices up fivefold with the western entrance blocked by Houthi forces. The Yemeni government has written to Guterres and the Council's October president citing the attack on the presidential palace in Aden, for which the letters gave no toll.

Macron landed in Kuwait on Monday after telling France on Sunday evening that he would travel despite riots that produced more than 2,000 arrests, because "I've taken a number of initiatives on an international level in order to ensure that we have fuel and gas and will continue to do so by visiting the Gulf countries in order to secure our supply." A presidential adviser put the aim as "additional volumes and more supplies for the French people, which will indirectly have an effect on prices." The itinerary is the four states whose energy sites have been hit in the Iran war and whose exports run through Hormuz; the Kingdom, whose main Red Sea terminal at Yanbu is under a French "strictly defensive" deployment announced last month, is the one producer with a route that does not, and it is not on the list.

The division of labour is the point. France has an aircraft carrier, Rafales, a frigate and air defence in the region since spring, assets at Yanbu, and now a foreign minister in Riyadh to "reaffirm France's solidarity with the kingdom in the face of repeated Houthi attacks"; it has a president in four capitals with the chief executives of its two largest energy companies. Solidarity goes to the state being attacked; the purchase orders go to the states that can load. The Kingdom will not have missed that the one European leader who has put military assets on its coast chose this week to put his own time elsewhere.

Three conversations ran in parallel on Sunday and the Kingdom was present at one of them. In Manama, Prince Faisal and Lavrov reviewed bilateral relations and, per the Saudi readout, "efforts to maintain regional security and stability," with Yemen and the two straits named; Anadolu reports both ministers voiced concern over tensions in the southern Arabian Peninsula and Bab al-Mandab. In Baghdad, at the OIC, Araghchi said Tehran's seven-day offer to reopen Hormuz still stands, that Washington's comments are "being reviewed," and that the strait could reopen within six days of US acceptance with talks the day after; Reuters lists the conditions as including the lifting of the US blockade on Iranian ports, the lifting of oil sanctions and an end to hostilities on all regional fronts, and notes Vance's demand earlier this month for a "meaningful" cut in enrichment capacity. On Truth Social, Trump endorsed Netanyahu as a "Great Warrior Prime Minister," said Iran had been weakened militarily and financially and that Washington would "soon finish the job" unless Tehran changed course, and warned Israeli voters that the US would have to act itself if they chose the "wrong Leader." Araghchi answered on X: "Want to try your luck again? Be our guest. But be careful; we have unfinished jobs too."

The structural fact is that "all regional fronts" in Tehran's conditions now includes the one on Saudi soil. An Iranian offer that trades Hormuz for an end to hostilities everywhere makes the Houthi campaign against the Kingdom a bargaining chip in a negotiation Riyadh is not party to, which is why the Saudi readout with Lavrov named both straits and why the GCC statement asked for a terrorist designation rather than a ceasefire. The Kingdom's interest is in separating the Yemen front from the Hormuz settlement so that it cannot be traded away or prolonged as leverage, and in keeping Moscow, which supplies Tehran and now diesel to Washington, on the record as concerned about Bab al-Mandab.

The price moved on Washington, the flows on Tehran. Brent briefly touched $110 on Friday for the first time since May and settled at $109.86, up 3.7 percent on the day; by 06:19 GMT on Monday it was $107.57, down 2.08 percent, with WTI at $99.46, after Trump signed an executive order on Friday waiving key sanctions and tariffs under the Graham Act he signed last month under congressional pressure over Ukraine. Rubio said the president would take up to 60 days to assess the impact on the global economy; the waiver follows a diesel deal with Putin starting at about 2.3 million barrels this month and rising to about 7.6 million a month. Phillip Nova's Priyanka Sachdeva called it "another desperate attempt to keep oil prices in check ahead of the US midterm elections" that "does little to address the physical supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz"; DBS expects $100 to $110 into the midterms because "Iran and its proxies would ensure oil prices and domestic fuel prices remain the key irritant for US voters."

The physical side is Kpler's note of Friday: Gulf crude flows at about 8.5 million barrels a day on a seven-day average last week, from more than 20 million the week before, with at least 10 confirmed incidents involving commercial vessels. On Monday the IRGC said an oil tanker on the strait's "unauthorized southern route," with its positioning and navigation systems disabled, struck a naval mine and caught fire in the engine room, a day after it reported two tankers on mines; the Guards' naval commander Ali Ozmaei said this week that any vessel deactivating its navigation systems would be treated as "hostile." No shipping authority named the vessels in the sources fetched. The Kingdom's barrel is on both sides of the arithmetic: Aramco rose 2.1 percent on Sunday on the Friday price, and its export volumes are inside Kpler's 8.5 million.

The release is accurate and its timing is a message. SPA reported on Monday that net FDI inflows for 2025 were SR159 billion, or $41.7 billion, up 33.5 percent on 2024, that the FDI stock rose 8.3 percent to SR1.06 trillion, that inflows were five times their 2017 level and the stock had doubled over the same period, and that the compound annual growth rates from 2017 were 24 percent for inflows and 10 percent for the stock. The release attributes this to the "economic and structural changes introduced since the launch of Saudi Vision 2030" and to the Kingdom's "growing appeal to foreign investors." Every word of that describes the year before the Hormuz closure on February 28, the first Houthi missile on the capital, and the strike on Aramco's Dhahran tower.

The 2026 picture the release does not carry was on the record the same weekend. Kingdom Centre's management told office employees on Sunday that "remote working arrangements are mandatory for all office employees at Kingdom Centre, effective immediately and until further notice," with no reason given, after authorities issued a threat alert for the capital and Riyadh's schools extended remote learning; the tower's tenants include Merrill Lynch, McKinsey and the IMF. The Ministry of Finance's pre-budget statement on September 30 already put real GDP down 3.6 percent this year with oil activity down 21.8 percent. A 2025 FDI print is the last clean investment number the Kingdom has, and the inference is that it was released to be quoted before 2026's is counted.

Reuters' Sunday table is a map of who pays for what. Saudi Arabia's index rose 0.8 percent to 10,190, led by Aramco's 2.1 percent, on a Brent settlement of $109.86 that was itself the product of attacks on Gulf shipping; Qatar's index fell 2 percent to 8,634, its lowest close since April 2020, with Industries Qatar down 4.3 percent and Qatar Islamic Bank down 2.6 percent; Egypt's EGX30 fell 2.6 percent to 50,896, its biggest intraday fall since February, on the day the presidency pledged support to Riyadh and parliament was expected to vote. Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait were down fractions.

The Saudi number is the barrel, not the balance sheet. Aramco's shares rose on the oil price five days after a missile struck an office tower in its Dhahran headquarters, damaging the top three floors per a company source to Reuters, with the Energy Ministry describing a "limited fire" and no casualties. The company has published nothing further on the damage in the sources fetched. What the market is saying is that at $110 the Kingdom's equity earns more from the premium than it loses to the missiles, so long as Ras Tanura and Yanbu load; the Qatari and Egyptian prints say the same war costs an LNG exporter behind Hormuz six years of index and costs a volunteer ally its worst day since February.