A Minimum Protection: What the Church Asks of Every Side After Missiles Hit Riyadh’s Airport

On Saturday, a Houthi missile killed at least 12 people at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, and on Sunday the airport was hit again. The dead came from at least 9 countries. The Houthis say they are answering Saudi bombing in Yemen. Washington is deciding whether to join the Saudi response to that attack. Before anyone settles who started this round of fighting, the Church asks a more fundamental question: once a war is underway, who may never be made the target of that war?

The News Story

A missile strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, October 10, killed at least 12 people and wounded 309 individuals, according to Saudi authorities. The Associated Press called it the deadliest attack on Saudi soil in more than a decade, and the deadliest in any Gulf Arab state since the Iran war began. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack. A day later, on Sunday, another projectile hit a passenger terminal at the same airport. Saudi officials reported injuries at Terminals 3 and 4, which handle domestic flights. The airport has remained closed since.¹

The dead came from at least 9 countries. Saudi authorities listed four Saudi citizens, two Bangladeshis, a Palestinian, an American, an Egyptian, a Jordanian, a Syrian, and a Sudanese. Egyptian state media identified one victim as Azza Ramzy, 28, a flight attendant for the Saudi carrier Flynas. India’s embassy said an Indian national wounded in the attack later died, which would bring the death toll to 13.²

The weekend strikes capped a week of attacks on Saudi airports. Strikes on Tuesday and Wednesday killed three foreign nationals at King Khalid and at Abha Airport in the southwest. On Thursday, two more strikes at King Khalid killed three Saudis, including Saudia captain Hamoud Ali Al-Kalthami, and damaged an empty Saudia aircraft on the ground. By CBS News’ count, the Riyadh airport has been hit 4 times in 5 days. Saudi authorities also confirmed an attack on Sunday on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam.³

Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said the attacks answered “brutal Saudi aggression against our country and our people.” The group says Saudi Arabia carried out more than 120 airstrikes in Houthi-held Yemen in a single 24-hour period, and it accused the Saudis of striking Sanaa International Airport on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday the Houthis warned that Saudi “airports and airspace are exposed to targeting,” excluding only Mecca and Medina, and told passengers not to travel.⁴

The attacks follow an offensive launched about a week earlier by Yemen’s internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi-led air power, to retake territory from the Houthis. The Yemen conflict, largely dormant since 2022, flared again in July. A Saudi diplomat said on Friday that government forces had taken the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. By Saturday, government forces reported advances near the strait but had not secured it, and the Houthis denied losing ground.⁵

President Trump said on Saturday that the United States “may” join Saudi strikes on the Houthis. “We’re going to look at it,” he said. “We’ll make a decision. We move very quickly.” No decision had been announced as of Sunday night. In late September, according to The New York Times and Reuters, Trump called off planned U.S. strikes on the Houthis at the last minute after first agreeing to a request from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States “strongly condemns the recent attacks on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the terrorist Houthis.”⁶

The disruption has spread well beyond Riyadh. FlightAware counted at least 291 Riyadh flights canceled in 24 hours, and carriers including Lufthansa Group, Air India, FlyDubai and Pakistan International Airlines suspended service. The United States, Britain, Germany, Australia and Canada told citizens to avoid the airport, and Riyadh schools moved online. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey issued a joint condemnation on Sunday, as did the United Nations and the European Commission. AP reported that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is low on missile interceptors and has asked France, Britain, Pakistan and Egypt for help with air defense.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

A Terminal Full of Travelers

Azza Ramzy was 28 and worked as a flight attendant for Flynas, a Saudi budget airline. On Saturday she was at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh when a Houthi missile struck it. She died with at least 11 others: four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, a Palestinian, an American, a Jordanian, a Syrian and a Sudanese. An Indian man who was wounded died later.⁸ Three hundred and nine people were hurt. On Sunday another projectile hit Terminals 3 and 4, the ones that handle domestic flights.⁹

The Houthis have explained themselves. Their spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, called the strikes an answer to “brutal Saudi aggression against our country and our people,” and the group says Saudi aircraft carried out more than 120 airstrikes in Yemen in a single day.¹⁰ That claim deserves a hearing. Yemen has suffered terribly since 2015, and I wrote here a week ago about the hunger in besieged Taiz. But this week’s question sits underneath the argument over who started this round. Suppose the Houthis’ grievance were entirely true and just. Would it make a passenger terminal a fair target? That is the question through which this attack must be examined.

The Church answered that question more than 60 years ago, and her answer is no.

The Law That Outlives the First Shot

The Second Vatican Council wrote a sentence in Gaudium et Spes that every army and every militia should be required to memorize: “Nor, by the same token, does the mere fact that war has unhappily begun mean that all is fair between the warring parties.”¹¹ The Catechism repeats it under the fifth commandment and adds that “the Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict.”¹²

The word that matters there is permanent. Wars tempt the people who fight them to treat the rules as suspended until the shooting stops. The moral law has no wartime exception. A man may lawfully defend his country, and the same man remains bound by every commandment while he does it. That is worth repearting here. No matter the nature of the conflict or what precipitated it, man remains bound by every commandment even during the defense of his country.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church spells out what that means for the people caught in the middle. “The right to use force for purposes of legitimate defense is associated with the duty to protect and help innocent victims who are not able to defend themselves from acts of aggression.” Then it names the abuse it has in mind: “Far too often, the civilian population is hit and at times even becomes a target of war.”¹³ In the next paragraph, it calls the protection of civilians an obligation of “the principle of humanity inscribed in the conscience of every person and all peoples,” and it warns that this “minimum protection of the dignity of every person” is “all too often violated in the name of military or political demands which should never prevail over the value of the human person.”¹⁴

Military or political demands. That is exactly the language of Saree’s statement. A blockade, a bombing campaign, a demand that Riyadh change its policy: each may be real, and none of them outranks a 28-year-old flight attendant.

Who Counts as a Combatant

The Catechism makes the line plain: “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.”¹⁵ A traveler in a domestic terminal is a non-combatant, as is the man who mops its floors. Hamoud Ali Al-Kalthami, the Saudi captain killed at the same airport on Thursday, was also a non-combatant.¹⁶

The Houthis have tried to move that line. On Saturday Saree warned that Saudi “airports and airspace are exposed to targeting and constitute a theatre of operations for our forces,” and he told passengers not to travel.¹⁷ A warning is better than a surprise, and people who heeded it may be alive today. But a warning cannot turn a civilian into a soldier. A passenger who ignores it is still a passenger. All it does is announce in advance that the people issuing it intend to do something the moral law forbids.

Pope Leo XIV has sharpened this point for our own time. Magnifica Humanitas is an encyclical about artificial intelligence, and its fifth chapter turns to war because missiles and drones now let men kill at a distance they never had before. Among the criteria Leo sets for any use of force, the third is “the identification and protection of civilians.” He writes: “Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict. Target selection and the use of force must not confuse combatants and non-combatants, nor ignore the impact on defenseless populations.”¹⁸ A ballistic missile fired from northern Yemen never sees the face of anyone in Terminal 3. That’s precisely the danger Leo names, and it is a danger that is ever-increasing.

And Leo goes further than the older tradition did. In the same chapter, he writes that, “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” He adds that “the use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”¹⁹ Catholics used to weigh a war by running it through a checklist of conditions. Leo keeps the right to defend, narrows it, and asks every party to begin with the people who will bleed.

The Cruel Thirst for Vengeance

This same teaching binds Riyadh, and Washington too if it joins in. The Saudi-led coalition has called the airport attack a war crime and vowed to respond “firmly.”²⁰ The Houthis say Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa’s airport on both Saturday and Sunday.²¹ If that is true, the people on the ground at Sanaa are owed exactly what the people in Riyadh were owed.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the classic Catholic account of when force may be used, insisted that even a ruler with lawful authority and a real grievance can sin in war through a wicked intention. He quotes St. Augustine: “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”²²

Read that list and then read this week’s statements. The Houthis frame each strike as payment for the last Saudi raid. The coalition promises payment in return. A missile answers an airstrike, an airstrike answers a missile, and each side’s dead become the other side’s justification. Thomas would call that the thirst for vengeance, and he would not let either side hide behind the other’s guilt.

The Compendium saw this kind of war coming two decades ago. It warned that “the terrifying power of the means of destruction” is now within reach of “medium and small-sized countries,” and that this makes it “very difficult or practically impossible to limit the consequences of a conflict.”²³ The Houthis are not even a state, and they have now shut the main airport in the capital of the world’s largest oil exporter. Every government weighing a wider war should slow down.

Taking the Side of the Victims

President Trump said Saturday that the United States “may” join the Saudi strikes. “We’ll make a decision,” he said. “We move very quickly.”²⁴ Speed isn’t a virtue in that sentence. Leo warns in Magnifica Humanitas that “speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motivating force for the irreversible decisions made in the context of war.”²⁵ Any response should and must be measured.

He also asks something of the rest of us. “When we witness the bombing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, schools or vital infrastructure, and violence that affects children, we are confronted with scandals that wound humanity itself,” he writes, and so “we cannot limit ourselves to the level of abstract analysis.” He asks us, with Pope Francis, to “touch the wounded flesh” of those who suffer, to look at their faces and listen to their stories.²⁶

Taking the side of victims is the Catholic position here, and it cuts in every direction. It means saying plainly that the strikes on King Khalid airport were gravely wrong. It means holding Saudi pilots over Sanaa to the same standard. And it means asking Washington to weigh, before it decides “very quickly,” how many more terminals and markets a wider war will reach.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether the United States joins the strikes, and what targets it chooses if it does. Watch for an independent account of what was hit in Sanaa. Watch whether Oman’s quiet diplomacy, which the Saudi foreign minister raised by phone with his Omani counterpart, produces any pause at all.²⁷

Then pray. Pray for Azza Ramzy and the others killed in Riyadh, for the 309 wounded, and for the families waiting in Dhaka, Cairo, Amman and Khartoum for bodies to come home. Pray for the people of Sanaa and Saada, who will live under whatever answer comes. Pray for the Houthi commanders and for the Saudi and American officials deciding what to do next, that they remember the people in the terminals are human beings like them. And pray that both sides learn, before more people die, that the moral law did not stop applying when the first missile was fired.

---

This story turns on the protection of civilians in war: the moral law does not lapse when the fighting starts, and no grievance makes a traveler, a worker or a child a lawful target.

One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.

Get it by email

---

Notes

1. ↑ “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again, a day after deadly strike killed at least 12,” CBS News, with the Associated Press, updated October 11, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Live Updates: Iran calls U.S. response ‘insufficient’ amid stalled talks to end the war,” CBS News, accessed October 12, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Houthis launch deadly attack on Riyadh airport as Trump weighs retaliatory strikes,” Fox News, October 11, 2026, foxnews.com.
2. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
3. ↑ “Houthi attacks on Saudi airports, flight disruptions: key events,” Khaleej Times, October 9, 2026, khaleejtimes.com; CBS News, “Live Updates”; CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
4. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again”; “Trump weighs joining fight against Houthis after Riyadh airport struck again,” Associated Press via ABC News, October 10, 2026, abcnews.com.
5. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight”; Khaleej Times, “Houthi attacks on Saudi airports”; CBS News, “Live Updates.”
6. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight”; Idan Kweller, “Trump calls off planned US strikes on Houthis at last minute after Saudi plea – report,” Jerusalem Post, September 21, 2026, jpost.com; CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
7. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight”; CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again”; CBS News, “Live Updates.”
8. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
9. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight”; CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
10. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
11. ↑ Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), no. 79, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2312, vatican.va.
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 504, vatican.va.
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 505.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2313.
16. ↑ Khaleej Times, “Houthi attacks on Saudi airports”; CBS News, “Live Updates.”
17. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again.”
18. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 199, vatican.va.
19. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192.
20. ↑ “Morning Briefing: Oct. 11, 2026,” Anadolu Agency, October 11, 2026, aa.com.tr.
21. ↑ CBS News, “Passenger terminal in Riyadh airport hit again”; Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight.”
22. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 40, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
23. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 498.
24. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight.”
25. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 199.
26. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 216.
27. ↑ Associated Press, “Trump weighs joining fight.”

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, complete set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)