The Gulf has entered a new era of instability. If its leaders think they can rely on old alliances, they are wrong | Nesrine Malik

On Saturday, Houthi rebels launched a shocking and deadly attack on Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. At the time of writing, the missile strike on King Khalid international airport has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, marking a significant turn in a regional conflagration that is only getting more intense. It was the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. In Saudi Arabia, a country that is unaccustomed to such fatalities, the death toll is bewilderingly high and likely to prompt a bloody response.

Over the past year, the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed. This may feel like an overstatement – casualties have been relatively low, after all, compared with Gaza and Iran – but the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.

The first audacious and unthinkable thing happened just over a year ago, when Iran fired missiles at an airbase in Qatar that hosts American troops, in retaliation for US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Lighting up Doha’s skies and scattering shrapnel, it was a dismaying moment for the Qataris, who have tried to maintain good relations with Iran. But even then there was a degree of warning and coordination that signalled this was a face-saving measure on the part of the Iranians. Yet later in 2025, with no similar warning or choreography, Israel struck Doha, targeting Hamas members and killing five Palestinians and one Qatari. That was the beginning of the end of a longstanding norm and expectation – that there was a sanctity to Gulf lives and sovereignty, one secured by the management of the relationship with Iran and alliances with the US.

Then came Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, which drew the Gulf once and for all into the fray. In retaliation for what Iran perceives to be political, military and logistical support for the offensive against it, Tehran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. Iran targeted military sites, energy facilities, desalination plants – an entire infrastructure that underpins the economies of these countries. Much damage was inflicted by the suspension of normal life, the shuttering of schools for months, the closure of airports and airspace.

The most disastrous consequence of all, from the perspective of Gulf rulers, has been the way the attacks have disrupted the integration of these countries into the cosmopolitan international community as places for tourism, entrepreneurs, sports and entertainment. They spent billions in securing Formula One, golf and boxing franchises and tournaments, only for a flurry of cheap drones to put it all at risk.

The result is a fractious unravelling that has reactivated hostilities that had laid dormant. Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Iran-backed Houthi rebels, in aspiration to greater autonomy in the minority Shia homelands, took over the capital city, Sana’a. In 2015, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia led a brutal campaign to dislodge the Houthis from territories they had gained, intensifying a grinding civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and triggered a humanitarian catastrophe. The war deescalated in 2022 with a de facto but unformalised division of the country between the Houthis and an internationally recognised, Saudi-backed government; the ceasefire was followed by rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

But the 2026 war against Iran opened up strategic opportunities and stirred political loyalties, triggering a surge of Houthi advancement in Yemen. The closure of the strait of Hormuz, for example, shifted more commercial traffic along Yemen’s coastline, prompting the Houthis to make advances and seize territory in order to gain control of the now crucial Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea. Tensions came to a head five months after the start of the war, with Saudi Arabia escalating strikes against the Houthis, and the Saudi-backed government bombing its own airport in Sana’a to prevent an Iranian plane from landing.

These developments are not just the result of a mischievous group seizing the moment, acting as spoiler in a bigger contest between Iran and the west. The Houthis are backed by Iran, but they are not empty proxies for Iran; they have domestic ambitions and sharp regional animosities, particularly against the House of Saud, which they see an imperious and arrogant master to whom they shall never submit. A senior Houthi official said that Saturday’s attack took place “so that the world understands” that Yemeni civilian infrastructure has been, and is being, targeted by the Saudis, gesturing towards that sense that Riyadh treats Yemeni lives as cheap.

From another perspective, what we are witnessing in the region is another consequence of Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, and what followed in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The final piece that was stabilising the region’s tense equilibriums fell away when Trump decided that the safety and security of the US’s Gulf allies was secondary to his Iran “excursion”, as he called it. The limits of relying on the US security umbrella became clear both to allies and enemies.

Last month, the Trump administration refused to extend military assistance to Saudi Arabia to fight the Houthis, after a meeting of US officials with the Houthis, who assured them that they would not attack US ships in the Red Sea, only Saudi vessels. What is upon Saudi Arabia now is a long, intractable war with a resourceful and impassioned antagonist, one willing to sustain a high degree of pain in ways that Riyadh can’t match without orienting itself entirely towards war. If the 2015 campaign is anything to go by, it will claim thousands of lives with only a remote possibility of a decisive outcome.

And so Saudi, and the entire Gulf, are pulled further into the relentless storm. Trump cannot bring the Iran war to an end, Gaza remains an open wound, Israel continues to strike and occupy parts of Lebanon. The Houthi resurgence represents a new reality in a region that is bewildered and losing lives and capital, stuck between old alliances that no longer work and new hostilities that are too calamitous to confront.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist