Three people were killed in Abu Dhabi on Monday when several fuel tankers exploded in a possible drone strike, according to state-run media and local authorities in the United Arab Emirates.

The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, which has fought a yearslong war with a Saudi-led military coalition that includes the United Arab Emirates, claimed that it had launched a military operation against the U.A.E., but provided few additional details.

The Houthis in Yemen frequently target neighboring Saudi Arabia with drone strikes, including one on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 that deeply disrupted the country’s oil exports, and also claim to have struck the U.A.E. several times, though the U.A.E. has consistently denied it.

A minor fire also broke out in the Abu Dhabi International Airport, raising the possibility that it too was the target of a drone strike. The police in Abu Dhabi said there were indications that “small flying objects, possibly belonging to drones” started the fires, one of which led to the explosion of the three petroleum gas tankers in an industrial district in southwestern Abu Dhabi near storage tanks for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

The Emirati authorities did not immediately blame any group for the attacks.

The attack came amid a recent escalation of tensions between the Houthis and the Saudi-led forces in Yemen that has shifted the war’s momentum after months of Houthi gains. The ongoing offensives have complicated international efforts to broker cease-fire negotiations to end the war, which has caused what aid groups call the world’s biggest humanitarian disaster.

Days earlier, U.A.E.-backed Yemeni militias launched an offensive against Houthi fighters in the central province of Marib, where most of the worst fighting in Yemen has occurred over the last year as the Houthis seek to seize crucial oil and gas infrastructure controlled by the Saudi-backed government. The Saudi-led coalition said on Twitter that it had carried out 39 operations against the Houthis in Marib in the past 24 hours, killing 230 fighters and destroying 21 military vehicles.

Emirati-backed forces recently claimed that they had taken the nearby province of Shabwa from Houthi control. And Houthi fighters have also refused to release the cargo and crew of a U.A.E.-flagged ship they seized earlier this month that they claimed was carrying weaponry, despite calls to do so from the United Nations. The Saudi-led coalition has said that the ship was instead carrying medical supplies from a field hospital, calling the seizure an act of “piracy.”

The two sides have been at war since 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen, seeking to push out the Houthis after the rebel group had seized Yemen’s capital and toppled the internationally recognized government.

The U.A.E. initially committed its own troops to the fight, but later withdrew as casualties mounted.

N.Y Times