Saudi forces shoot down missile from Yemen

Saudi forces shot down a ballistic missile launched from Yemen toward the city of Abha early Monday, the leadership of the Arab Coalition supporting Yemen’s UN-backed government said. 
A team from the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces intercepted the missile at 6:10 a.m., said a coalition statement carried by Saudi Press Agency (SPA).
“It was intercepted with no injuries,” the statement said, adding that the rocket launcher inside Yemeni territory was subsequently destroyed.
The coalition did not say who launched the missile. Previous missile attacks had been blamed on the Iran-backed Houthis, who are allied with troops loyal to Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
It was at least the fourth ballistic missile launched across the border since UN-brokered peace talks began in Kuwait in April between Houthi rebels and the government of President Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Fighting has continued despite a formal cease-fire in conjunction with the peace talks.
Houthis and Saleh's loyalists overran Yemen’s capital Sanaa in 2014 before moving into other parts of the country, prompting the Saudi-led coalition to intervene with air strikes and other support in March last year.
Saudi Arabia has deployed Patriot missile batteries to counter tactical ballistic missiles which have been fired occasionally during the war.
The UN special envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said on Wednesday that the warring parties were taking a two-week break from the peace talks which have made little headway.
The UN says more than 6,400 people have been killed in Yemen since March last year, most of them civilians.
Fighting has driven 2.8 million people from their homes and left more than 80 percent of the population needing humanitarian aid.
On the Saudi side of the frontier, dozens of civilians and soldiers died in skirmishes and artillery barrages earlier in the war.

Source : Arab News