Iranian flights to and from Yemen are an unacceptable violation of the country’s sovereignty, the vice-president in Yemen’s Saudi-backed, UN-recognised government has said.

Axar.az reports, citing Guardian, Abdullah al-Alimi said in an interview that the planes contained equipment for the Houthi movement, which he said had transformed from merely a domestic threat into a regional and international threat to global security and the global economy.

He was speaking after Yemeni government planes, supported by Saudi Arabia, bombed the Houthi-controlled Sana’a airport in protest at Iranian efforts to send a plane to the city containing a Houthi delegation returning from the funeral of the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

The plane containing the delegation eventually landed at another airport, in the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeidah. The Houthis fired missiles at Saudi Arabia in response, breaking a four-year truce in the ⁠conflict between Saudi Arabia and ⁠the Iran-aligned group.

An emergency session of the UN security council heard calls for both sides to de-escalate.