Pakistan says Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia could activate the Mecca defence pact
Yemen Herald News 
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s defence minister said any attack on Saudi Arabia could bring the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement into force, days after Houthi missiles hit the kingdom.
“If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” Khawaja Asif told the Pakistani broadcaster Geo News.
He spoke on Tuesday night, according to Al Jazeera, which reported the remarks the following day.
“There should be no doubt about that,” Asif said. “We are bound by the terms and conditions of this pact, and we will honour them in case there is a need.”
Bloomberg reported the same pledge on Sept. 9.
Leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca agreement last month. The three committed to reinforce collective deterrence against aggression.
The text mirrors a NATO clause under which a strike on one member counts as a strike on all. The mechanisms for carrying that out have not been set out.
The three states signed as they weighed Israel’s expanding military capabilities and Iran’s reach across the region.
Together they field close to 1.4 million active troops, about 3,400 military aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval assets, according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index, which assesses 145 countries.
Houthi forces attacked southern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. Riyadh said at least 73 people were wounded.
The Houthis have declared a blockade on Saudi vessels passing through Bab al-Mandab.
The strait has taken on weight for Saudi oil exports since Iran began restricting passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Al-Masirah, the Houthi-run television channel, said on Wednesday that Saudi warplanes struck Marib, al-Jawf and Taiz governorates.
It said five strikes hit the Khab wa Sha’af district of al-Jawf, 10 hit areas of Sirwah in Marib and five hit al-Barh in Taiz. Saudi forces did not comment.
That account rests on Al-Masirah, and no independent confirmation of those strikes has been published.
The fighting is the most serious escalation since a United Nations-brokered truce halted large-scale combat in 2022.
Yemen’s war began in 2014, when the Houthis took Sanaa. A Saudi-led military intervention followed the next year.
Combat resumed in July, when government forces struck the Houthi-held airport in Sanaa and blocked an aircraft arriving from Iran.
The Houthis then opened an offensive through western Taiz and southern Hodeidah, pushing toward Mocha and the strait.
They took Mocha on Thursday and pressed south to Dhubab, Yemeni officials told The National.
The officials said the group also took Perim island, known in Arabic as Mayyun, and Zuqar island, giving it command of Bab al-Mandab.
A Houthi military spokesman said the group had seized 5,400 square kilometres. The Yemeni government disputes Houthi accounts of the offensive.
Perim covers about 13 square kilometres and sits in the strait between the Yemeni mainland and Djibouti.
Zuqar covers about 130 square kilometres and lies about 32 kilometres off Yemen’s west coast.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sept. 8 that the Houthis are “agents and proxies of the Iranians.” Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, rejected the accusation and said the group acts on its own.
Five Yemeni military sources said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed the coastal campaign, according to reporting by Reuters and The National. A third Iranian source told The National that the move on Mocha was a Houthi decision.
Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, warned this month of grave consequences for civilians and urged the parties to hold back from further escalation.
Doctors Without Borders said Friday that many residents had left Mocha, that health workers had abandoned most hospitals in the area and that several facilities had stopped working.
The International Organization for Migration has said at least 46,000 people fled the fighting in south-western Yemen.
The United Nations humanitarian plan for Yemen this year counts more than 22 million people who need assistance.
It puts 18.3 million people at acute levels of food insecurity and records more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished, including 516,157 severe cases.
The plan counts 5.2 million people displaced inside Yemen and seeks 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million of them.
Government forces had used Zuqar to watch shipping traffic and to interdict weapons smuggling in the Red Sea.
Bab al-Mandab links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. To the north, the Red Sea runs to the Suez Canal.
Tareq Saleh, vice chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, said government forces had taken deaths and injuries over several days of fighting. He named the National Resistance, the Giants Brigades and the Nation’s Shield forces among the units involved.
Amr al-Bidh, an exiled figure in Yemen’s Southern Movement, attributed the collapse on the coast to a security vacuum. “The deterrence on the west coast was not there any more,” he said.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British ambassador to Yemen, linked the two waterways. “It should have been obvious that Bab Al Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz are linked to each other,” he told The National.
Rajeh Badi, Yemen’s ambassador to Qatar, told Al Jazeera on Sept. 9 that his government had not broken any truce since 2021. He called the Houthis the aggressors.
The Houthis reject that account. They say their operations answer Saudi and Yemeni government attacks.
Geo News is a private Pakistani broadcaster.
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