Saudi air strikes target Yemen rebels! Options

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Saudi Arabia said on Friday that its jets and ground forces had blasted Yemen rebel positions along the two countries' rugged frontier amid reports of casualties among the Saudi population in the area.

Sporadic shelling could be heard from the border around the Jebel al-Dukhan mountain and jets screeched overhead on Friday after two days of aerial bombing of the Zaidi rebels, according to an AFP photographer.

The air strikes from southern Jizan province were to "neutralise the firing by intruders" and to clear areas where they had encroached on Saudi territory, the government said in a statement on the official SPA news agency.

Earlier, a government adviser said Saudi F-15 and Tornado jets had bombed camps of the Zaidi rebels inside Yemeni territory on Wednesday and Thursday in response to a rebel attack on a border post a day earlier that left one Saudi border guard dead and 11 injured.

"We took back a small piece of territory and hit their camps around Saada," a rebel stronghold province over the border.

"They've been hit hard and it's ongoing," the advisor told AFP, adding that the move was taken with the knowledge of the Yemeni government.

It was the first acknowledged Saudi involvement in the Yemen government's three month campaign against the Shiite Zaidi rebels in the country's mountainous northwest corner.

The Saudi statement said it was responding to an incursion into its territory and attacks on its citizens, and said the counter attack was necessary to prevent the rebels from being able to fire into Saudi territory.

The London-based Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported that four Saudi women were killed when their border region home was shelled.

Other media reports said 40 of the rebels had surrendered to Saudi forces.

The SPA statement said government forces attacked rebel positions "inside Saudi territory" around Jebel al-Dukhan which straddles the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia's Jizan province.