The weekend before last, a Houthi negotiator under American sanctions sat with US officials inside the American embassy in Muscat to reaffirm a ceasefire whose entire published text is one sentence. Saudi Arabia is not in the sentence. Less than a week later a Houthi ballistic missile was fired at Riyadh. If you assume a ceasefire covers the people being shot at, this one never did, and Friday breached nothing. Oman published the text on 6th May 2025. In the future, neither side will target the other, including American vessels, in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait, ensuring freedom of navigation and the smooth flow of international commercial shipping. There is no signed agreement and the United States has never published terms of its own. When reporters asked, Central Command sent them to the White House. Two parties and one named class of ship. Israel was carved out the same day, by the Houthis, out loud, and Saudi Arabia was not carved out, which would at least be a decision. It was never written in. The thing works. No American bomb has fallen on the Houthis since 6th May 2025, and no confirmed Houthi hit on an American target has been recorded since. A US official told CNN the two sides had solidified the ceasefire at that meeting, which Reuters reported citing five sources. Asked about American military action against the group, the official gave three words. No offensive strikes. Both sides describe the exception the same way. The Houthis told the Americans in Muscat they would not hit US ships and that the ships they would hit are Saudi. In Dublin on 12th September the President said they are letting most ships go through, and there is just one country they are not too happy with, and we will get that straightened out. He did not say the name. CNN reported he meant Saudi Arabia, and every surrounding fact points there. In the very same week, on anonymous US-official accounts the Pentagon has neither confirmed nor denied, more than 100 American military personnel sit inside the kingdom in a new joint command. They hand geospatial targeting data to Saudi aircraft bombing that same group. Both things are current policy. Barbara Leaf, who ran the State Department's Near East bureau, put it on the record. A pretty harsh way to treat your relationship with a close partner, she said, to appear to privilege your agreement with a group you have designated as a terrorist organisation that attacked that partner. The coalition says it destroyed the missile at dawn without causing damage, and its statement never mentions the airport or any fire. An AFP journalist watched firefighters put out a burning tank carrying the Aramco logo at a nearby depot. The Wall Street Journal has three unnamed officials saying jet fuel facilities were hit. Nobody has established what started it, and the three accounts do not place it in the same spot. This was also not the first strike in four years. The coalition's own spokesman said 73 civilians were wounded on 8th September in Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jizan and Najran, and the US mission to the UN repeated the figure two days later. What changed on Friday is that it reached the capital, for the first time since March 2022.