HSC and equivalent exam results to be published on 29 October

Yemen's Houthi group said on Saturday that it had carried out a new round of missile and drone attacks on airports and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, while Saudi authorities reported that debris from intercepted missiles fell in the Mecca and Medina regions. Neither account could be independently verified, and Saudi Arabia did not confirm that any of the claimed targets was hit.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group targeted King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh "in two phases", as well as airports in Dammam in the east and Najran in the south. He also said it struck an Aramco facility in Yanbu, the Rabigh oil refinery, oil infrastructure and an airbase, according to accounts carried by the AFP news agency and Al Jazeera. The group described the operations as precise.

Saudi Arabia's civil defence agency said on X that it had responded to falling shrapnel after the interception of two ballistic missiles in the Mecca and Medina regions, the two holiest cities in Islam. It said some debris fell in Wadi Mughammas, outside Mecca. The Saudi Press Agency published images that appeared to show a large, blackened missile-shaped object on the ground, Al Jazeera reported.

The Houthis rejected the suggestion that they had aimed at the holy cities. "What the Saudi enemy is promoting about our forces targeting towards the holy areas of Mecca and Medina is a great and huge lie," Saree said. The secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, called the attacks "heinous" and said they showed a blatant disregard for civilian life.

The group presented the strikes as retaliation for Saudi air raids in Yemen. Its Al-Masirah television channel said a strike on a house in Sanaa killed four people, another on a residential building for cement factory workers killed eight, and a third outside Hodeida killed five members of one family, a toll of 17. Riyadh has not said it carried out those raids, and the reports could not be checked independently.

There was also fighting around Aden, the seat of Yemen's internationally recognised government. The government's Transport Ministry said the Houthis fired two ballistic missiles at Aden International Airport, the fourth such attack this month, and that the coastguard headquarters and a second building were hit. The Houthis said they targeted the al-Nasr camp and the city's naval base. Yemen's army said a Houthi missile malfunctioned and fell on a family home in Sanaa on Friday, killing three people.

Yemeni army spokesman Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili said government forces had carried out more than 700 operations across the country in 24 hours, "neutralising" 300 Houthi fighters and disabling vehicles. Al Jazeera said it could not verify those figures.

The exchange is the latest stage of a conflict that has widened since a fragile ceasefire agreed in 2022 collapsed in July. On 10 October, an attack on King Khalid International Airport that the Houthis claimed killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 300, the deadliest strike on the kingdom in more than a decade. Flights were suspended and later restored in stages.

Late on Saturday, the airport said Terminal 1 would handle domestic flights and Terminal 2 international flights operated by national carriers from Sunday. Hours later, Saree renewed a warning to airlines, airport staff and travellers, saying the airport remained a "military target" and that attacks on it would continue. Air India said passengers with confirmed bookings issued on or before 24 October could rebook flexibly or take a full refund, and offered a one-time complimentary change to other destinations it still serves in Saudi Arabia.

The strikes matter beyond the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is a major destination for Bangladeshi migrant workers and a large source of remittances, and thousands of Bangladeshis travel to the kingdom each year for work and Umrah. Renewed disruption at Riyadh or Dammam airports can delay those journeys, while any sustained risk to Saudi oil infrastructure feeds into crude prices, freight and the fuel import bill that Bangladesh already carries.

Several important questions remain open. It is not known whether any of the Houthi missiles or drones reached their intended targets, what damage they caused, or whether there were casualties. Saudi officials have confirmed interceptions and debris but have not given a full account of the attacks, and the claim about the holy cities is disputed by the two sides. The scale of the reported Saudi strikes in Yemen is also unconfirmed, as are the Yemeni army's battlefield figures.

The immediate test comes at Riyadh's airport on Sunday, when the new terminal arrangement is due to take effect under a public Houthi threat to keep targeting it. Airlines will decide whether to keep flying, and oil markets will weigh the risk to Yanbu, Rabigh and the kingdom's other energy sites when trading resumes. In Dhaka, the points to watch are fuel prices, air links to the Gulf and the remittances that millions of Bangladeshi households depend on.

Eight more children died with measles-like symptoms in Bangladesh in the 24 hours to 8:00am on Saturday, taking the combined death toll from the outbreak to 1,222 since the health directorate began publishing figures on 15 March.

The Directorate General of Health Services counted 104 of those deaths as laboratory-confirmed measles and 1,118 as suspected. The suspected category covers patients who died with measles symptoms but were never tested. No new confirmed death was recorded in the latest update, and three of the eight latest deaths were in Dhaka division, all of them in Dhaka district.

The same bulletin recorded 1,014 new suspected infections, raising the cumulative suspected caseload to 219,884, and 51 new laboratory-confirmed cases, for a confirmed total of 23,324. Hospitals have admitted 195,514 patients with suspected measles since March, of whom 187,605 have been treated and discharged.

The outbreak began in early March and has run for more than seven months, with cases reported across the country. Bangladesh had recorded no measles deaths and only 132 infections in the year before the outbreak, according to Prothom Alo, a reversal that health experts link to immunity gaps built up over several years.

The government's first emergency measles-rubella campaign ran from 5 April to 20 May. It was launched in 30 upazilas of 18 districts, extended to four city corporations and then made nationwide. Officials initially set a target of 18,015,064 children aged six to 59 months, but later calculations put the number in that age group about 4.4 million higher. Some areas reported coverage above 100 per cent, which the Expanded Programme on Immunisation attributed to children older than 59 months being vaccinated.

Surveys by the World Health Organization and UNICEF nevertheless found unvaccinated children in cities and villages. A vitamin A campaign that reached 22.36 million children in the same age band suggested that about 4.36 million had missed measles vaccination. After follow-up rounds, the health ministry said 2.4 million children were still unreached.

That gap led to a second nationwide catch-up campaign, launched on 26 September and due to run until 31 October, targeting 3.4 million children aged six to 59 months: 2.4 million described as previously missed and one million who had newly turned six months old. The directorate said 19,861,530 children had been vaccinated by 25 September.

Health Minister Sardar Md Sakhawat Husain told the launch in Dhaka's Korail that teams would go into villages rather than wait at campaign centres, so that no eligible child was left out. Director General of Health Services Professor Pravath Chandra Biswas said vaccination was the main way to bring the outbreak under control and that the aim was to cover every child aged six to 59 months. He also noted that isolating a sick child is difficult for poor families living in small homes.

The size of the remaining task is disputed. Two days before the campaign began, EPI officials said field offices had reported only about 1.2 million children who had missed vaccination, well short of the 2.4 million in the national plan, according to bdnews24.com. EPI assistant director Hasanul Mahmud said the plan drew on ministry estimates and vitamin A campaign figures, and that the eligible population changes daily as children reach and pass the age limit.

Visits by bdnews24.com to Barishal, Cox's Bazar Sadar, Mirpur and Naogaon found no house-to-house health workers asking families about unvaccinated children at the start of the drive. Former IEDCR director Professor Mahmudur Rahman questioned whether the reported coverage could be accurate, arguing that if it were, the outbreak would have visibly shrunk. Vaccine expert Tajul Islam A Bari said door-to-door listing, used in earlier campaigns, was not done this time.

Two groups remain outside the campaign. Routine immunisation gives the first measles-rubella dose at nine months and the second at 15 months, and the emergency campaigns covered children aged six to 59 months. Government data show that infants younger than six months and children older than five are also falling ill. Mahmudur Rahman said about one in ten current patients is under six months old. No decision has been announced on how to protect either group; the director general said IEDCR and icddr,b are studying the question.

Most hospital patients are treated on symptoms rather than a laboratory result, so the split between confirmed and suspected cases depends on testing. That limits how precisely the outbreak's true size can be measured.

What happens next depends on the catch-up drive, which ends on 31 October, and on daily health directorate updates that will show whether admissions fall. Bari has argued that protecting children aged six months to 15 years, roughly 60 million people, is what would break transmission; a 2014 campaign reached more than 50 million children.