A Houthi missile or drone strike tore into Saudi Arabia's King Fahd International Airport in Dammam on Wednesday, killing two people and injuring eight in the first deadly attack on the facility since the Yemeni rebel group began targeting it earlier this month, Saudi aviation officials said.

The General Authority of Civil Aviation said Thursday morning that flight operations had resumed at the airport, though material damage was still being assessed. The Houthi movement claimed responsibility for the strike, according to a report from The Hill, though Saudi authorities have not specified whether the weapon used was a ballistic missile, a cruise missile or a drone. An earlier strike on the airport on Oct. 11 caused no casualties.

Hours before the Dammam attack, Saudi air defenses intercepted a separate drone targeting Saudi Aramco's Shaybah oilfield in the kingdom's southeast. The energy ministry said debris from the intercepted drone killed two residents and injured two others.

Washington pulls back, London steps up

The twin strikes landed the same day the U.S. State Department ordered non-emergency personnel to leave its embassy in Riyadh, citing the escalating Houthi threat, according to Al Jazeera. The drawdown follows a broader pullback of U.S. troops and diplomatic posts across the Middle East that American officials have attributed to threats from Iran and its Houthi allies.

Britain, meanwhile, is moving the opposite direction. The U.K. announced this week it will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to help defend Saudi Arabia against further Houthi attacks, describing the mission as strictly defensive.

WE WILL NOT STAND BY WHILE OUR PARTNERS ARE TARGETED

The attacks are the latest escalation in Yemen's long civil war, which has increasingly spilled across the border into Saudi territory. Yemen's internationally recognized government has accused the Houthis of also striking airports in Aden and Mukalla this week, while the rebels claim a separate ballistic missile strike on a government military camp. The United Nations says the renewed fighting around Taiz has displaced nearly 260,000 people, and Yemeni officials held a mass funeral this week for 75 recruits killed in an earlier Houthi strike on a training camp.

Qatar and France have both called for a reopening of shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz and for a long-delayed Gaza ceasefire to be fully implemented, warning that the region's overlapping conflicts are feeding off one another. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has separately warned it could target U.S. bases if tanker traffic continues through Hormuz routes it considers illegal.

The State Department has not said how many staff are affected by the Riyadh drawdown or how long it expects to keep non-essential personnel out of the kingdom. Saudi officials have likewise not said when the Shaybah damage assessment will be complete, or whether further Houthi strikes are expected in the coming days.