Egypt offers Saudi Arabia military backing as Houthis threaten Riyadh

Badr Abdelatty's Bloomberg interview reframes Gulf defense, while a Houthi spokesman answers Saudi strikes with a capital-for-capital threat.

Egypt offers Saudi Arabia military backing as Houthis threaten Riyadh — Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told Bloomberg that Egypt is ready to provide military assistance to Saudi Arabia, including the possibility of joining a regional defense alliance.[^1] He paired the offer with a demand that Iran immediately halt Houthi attacks, and with an insistence that Cairo still promotes a political solution.[^1] The two halves of that sentence do not sit easily together: an offer to fight alongside Riyadh, and a call for diplomacy, issued in the same breath. The backdrop is a Saudi capital that has already been hit. On Saturday, 13 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in an attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh.[^2] A Houthi military spokesman threatened today (Tuesday) that any Saudi strike in Sanaa would be answered with a strike on Riyadh.[^2] Maariv frames Cairo's move as Egypt heading toward a military alliance with Saudi Arabia and Erdogan; i24news reads the same Gulf crisis as an opportunity for Israel, with Iran and the Houthis redrawing the map.[^1][^3] Same events, opposite protagonists. Elsewhere in the region, the Lebanese army seized a truck loaded with hundreds of kilograms of explosives in the Deir al-Bidar area of eastern Lebanon, on its way to Beirut.[^4] Ynet reports that Lebanese media, especially the anti-Hezbollah MTV channel, raised the hypothesis that Hezbollah planned to assassinate a senior political figure; Hezbollah's Lebanese parliament member Ibrahim Mousawi said the organization has nothing to be ashamed of and was never involved in a civil war or in political assassinations.[^4] In Gaza, senior Hamas official Ali al-Amoudi, who effectively heads the organization's political bureau there, survived an assassination attempt after receiving an intelligence warning.[^5] And in Syria, parliament has begun gathering signatures to repeal Law 49 of 1980.[^6] One year ago, on October 13, 2025, the final 20 living hostages returned from Gaza, and Donald Trump addressed the Knesset plenum, becoming only the fourth sitting US president to do so.[^7] Trump said then: "The hostages are back! It feels so good to say it