Saudi Arabia just shut down Riyadh's schools and a Houthi attack could be coming
4 days ago · 27 September 2026Share
Riyadh's skyline showing the King Abdullah Financial District and Kingdom Tower. File photo. B.alotaby · CC BY-SA 4.0
Riyadh's schools have gone dark for a week.
All of them. Every student, every teacher, every admin worker. Classes are moving online, and it happened overnight.
Gulf News says the lessons are running through Madrasati, the kingdom's usual remote-learning platform. But that detail only shows up in one report, so treat it as unconfirmed.
Here's how fast this moved. Parents got emails from their kids' schools this evening. The message just said quote "schools must remain closed all week".
That's it. That's the whole explanation anyone's been given.
No Saudi ministry has said why. The Ministry of Education hadn't commented when this broke, and it still hasn't said anything since.
So you have to read the timing instead.
A day before the schools closed, the Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Houthis said it had shot down two ballistic missiles heading for Khamis Mushait, and two drones heading for Riyadh.
Saudi civil defence sent alert warnings that night for Khamis Mushait and for Abha. Not for Riyadh.
So the capital was named as a target before its schools shut, and there was still no alert raised there.
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Contains Riyadh, Saudi Arabia photographed from the International Space Station, showing the desert city and its location in the Arabian Peninsula. File photo. NASA Johnson Space Center · Public domain
This isn't new. The Houthis have been ramping up attacks on Saudi Arabia since a truce that held for years collapsed in July. That's when they declared a naval blockade against the kingdom. Since then, drones and missiles aimed at Saudi cities have been intercepted again and again. The Houthis have also taken the whole of Yemen's western Red Sea coast, all the way to the Bab al-Mandeb strait.
Now the United Nations has weighed in. A couple of days ago, the Security Council condemned the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia in the strongest terms. Jerome Bonnafont, France's ambassador to the UN, delivered it — he holds the council's rotating presidency this month. The statement said the strikes have wounded civilians, including women and children, and demanded the Houthis stop the escalation immediately.
So the UN's top security body named Saudi Arabia as the country under attack. A couple of days later, its capital's schools went dark.
Jasem Al Budaiwi, the Gulf Cooperation Council's Secretary General, called the strikes on Riyadh and Khamis Mushait a serious breach of Saudi sovereignty. And Saudi Arabia's Defence Minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, met Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, in Riyadh around the same time, to talk through a joint response.
Here's why that meeting matters. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed a defence pact last month. Under it, an attack on any one of them counts as an attack on all three.
So Saudi Arabia is lining up military backing. And at the same time, parents in Riyadh are getting one-line emails and nothing else.
Not everyone is fine with that. One Riyadh parent said families deserve clear communication and transparency about the reasons behind a decision like this.
A Lebanese expatriate living in the city put it more simply: quote "we have no clue what's happening".
So what don't we know? Whether officials expect an attack on Riyadh within the week, or whether this is just a precaution based on the wider regional threat. How long the closure lasts if things get worse, or whether it ends early if they don't. And nobody, on the record, has said what actually triggered it.
Right now, a week's worth of Riyadh's children are learning from their bedrooms. And the only clue their parents have got is the explanation nobody gave them.
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