Saudi Arabia just accused the Houthis of targeting Islam's holiest cities twice in two weeks

A Houthi drone just hit a power station in Madinah.

That's the city with the Prophet's Mosque, Islam's second-holiest site.

It happened two days ago, at 05:11 in the morning.

The station is called Taibah. It feeds electricity to the whole area around the mosque.

A Saudi-led coalition investigation has now come back. It says the Houthis planned this and carried it out. They looked at the drone wreckage to get there.

So what actually got hit? One transformer. That's it.

The rest of the grid kept running. Nobody was killed. No major power cuts.

Turki Al-Maliki is the coalition's spokesperson. He announced all this two days after the strike.

He says the drone went after a civilian facility that supplies power to the Prophet's Mosque. And he says this is a pattern now, the Houthis going after Islam's two holiest mosques.

His words: says quote "deliberate provocation of millions of Muslims worldwide by targeting Makkah and Madinah".

Here's why that line matters. This is the second time in two weeks a Houthi drone has been linked to one of Saudi Arabia's holy cities.

Two weeks ago it was Makkah. Saudi air defences shot a Houthi drone down south of the city, before it got into restricted airspace. The coalition said that was only the second time ever the Houthis had tried to hit Makkah. The first was a missile back in 2017.

That interception wasn't clean either. The wreckage came down in Taif, nearby. One Yemeni resident died. A Saudi woman and a Pakistani national were hurt. Buildings and cars were damaged.

So in two weeks, Saudi Arabia says the Houthis have gone after both cities at the centre of the Islamic faith.

And the Gulf has reacted hard.

Jasem Al Budaiwi runs the Gulf Co-operation Council. He says quote "crossed all red lines and was a grave escalation in violating the sanctity of Islamic holy sites".

The UAE's Foreign Ministry called it a flagrant violation of Saudi sovereignty, and a threat to its security and stability.

Bahrain and Kuwait put out their own statements too. Separately.

So that's four Gulf governments, plus the GCC itself, treating one transformer as something much bigger than a power cut.

The Houthis reject all of it.

After the Makkah incident, their military spokesperson Yahya Sarea said the Saudi accusations were fabrications and lies. A separate Houthi military source told the group's own Saba news agency that the Houthis pose no threat to Makkah or any other holy site, and called the Saudi account propaganda.

On Madinah specifically, the Houthis haven't said a word yet.

And here's the gap. The physical damage was one transformer. The political reaction has been four governments in two days, because the real worry is the targeting itself, not the grid.

No source says the mosque itself was damaged. Only the power station that feeds the area was hit.

What we don't know: whether Saudi Arabia is planning to hit back directly over this one, and whether Iran had any role in directing it. No source makes that link.

The Houthis still haven't given their own account of what happened at Taibah.

Two attacks. Fourteen days. Two different holy cities. And so far, zero Houthi statements on this one.