Missiles land at Aden airport and a missile bound for the Saudi oil port of Yanbu is shot down, as Brent touches 110 dollars

Friday widened the Yemen war's target list in both directions at once: the airport of the government's own capital, and the oil port Saudi Arabia built to escape the Hormuz chokepoint.

In Aden, two missiles landed on the grounds of the international airport, the Aden Security Department said. A Yemenia Airways flight bound for Cairo was preparing for takeoff when they hit. No casualties were reported. The department blamed the Houthis. The group did not immediately claim responsibility, and it was the second attack on the airport in less than a week. The day before, missiles fired at the presidential palace complex in Aden killed five people, the government said, and Houthi forces are pressing a siege of Taiz, Yemen's third city, having cut the main road south to Aden and forced families into school stairwells and out of their homes.

The Saudi led coalition said on Friday it had intercepted a ballistic missile headed for Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast. Yanbu matters out of proportion to its size. It is the outlet that lets Saudi Arabia load crude for world markets without sending a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, where attacks on shipping this month have reached their highest weekly level of the war. The coalition said it also destroyed two cruise missiles over the Red Sea and three drones in the kingdom's southern and Riyadh regions, and did not name who fired them. Saudi civil defence issued alerts in Jazan and Khamis Mushait, in the southwest, where such warnings have become routine since the fighting resumed last month.

Markets read the day the way traders read this region now. Brent crude briefly touched 110 dollars a barrel on Friday, for the first time since May, as of October 16, on the fear that the Red Sea bypass itself is coming under fire. The logic of Yanbu was that it sat outside the war's geography. A missile aimed at it says the geography is expanding to meet the infrastructure, not the other way round. Aid agencies, meanwhile, warn that Yemen's humanitarian crisis is deepening fastest in the places the armies are closing on, Taiz first among them.