The coast had been burning for six months before the assault on the city itself. In December 2017, Saudi-led coalition forces - the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and a changing roster of Yemeni Government allies including the Southern Movement and the Tihama Resistance - began a creeping northward push along the Red Sea coast from the south. The fighting was not clean, and it was not brief. Commanders on both sides died in numbers: Houthi officers like Mansour Ahmed Hamoud Jahaf al-Makeni, killed in a December 11 Apache helicopter ambush that also killed fifty-three of his fighters; coalition commanders like Abdullah Jalmud and Asil Faisal Modara, killed in January's Hays battles; Houthi commander Abed Abdullah Hamza, killed in February. The named dead are only a fraction. Entire formations disappeared in airstrikes, and casualty tallies varied wildly depending on who was counting.

The civilians of the coast were not spared. Four civilians were killed and eleven wounded on 7 February 2018 when a Houthi rocket landed in Hays. Fourteen civilians from a single family died on 26 December 2017 when a coalition bomb hit a farm in Houthi-controlled Hodeidah. Five civilians died in a Hodeidah airstrike on 23 March 2018. Five girls were killed in a coalition airstrike on Hays on 28 February. Thirty people, both Houthis and civilians, died on 1 January 2018 when a coalition bombing hit a fuel store. The UN Human Rights Council announced on 9 February that 61,000 people had been displaced from Taiz and Hudaydah governorates since December - 71 percent of all Yemeni displacement during that period. The people whose names appear in no accounting at all are the far larger number of civilians whose deaths went uncounted on both sides of the line.

The June 13 assault on the city itself marked the campaign's climax. Coalition forces pushed from the south, supported by UAE Apache helicopters, airstrikes, and naval bombardment. The Houthis had dug in. The Houthi commander in Hays, Omar al-Ansi, had been executed earlier by his own command for abandoning positions. Several months of fighting followed. The offensive reached the city outskirts but stalled at the port - the one piece of infrastructure everyone needed intact. UN diplomats negotiated a ceasefire framework in December 2018. An April 2022 UN-initiated ceasefire finally halted the active fighting on the coast, leaving the Houthis in control of Hudaydah Governorate. More than six hundred people had been reported killed in the heaviest single stretch of fighting, from late May through early June 2018, though actual casualties were almost certainly higher.

Hudaydah has a population estimated at 600,000 to 700,000, most of them Yemeni families whose connection to the Houthi political movement varies widely. They included fishermen whose boats worked the Red Sea coast; laborers at the port; merchants and market workers; farmers in the surrounding Tihama plain; and humanitarian aid recipients, because Hudaydah Governorate was one of the places the UN World Food Programme was actively trying to feed. The city had been spared direct ground combat for years, partly because both sides recognized that taking it could trigger a famine. When two thousand Emirati troops arrived, the residents had no viable evacuation route and the aid agencies warned that interrupting the port's operations could push a malnourished country over the edge into actual starvation.

Saleh Ali al-Sammad, chairman of the Houthi Supreme Political Council - the highest-ranking Houthi political official - was killed on 19 April 2018 in a coalition air raid in the al-Buraihi area of Hudaydah province. On 13 November 2021, Saudi-led coalition forces quietly left their positions around Hudaydah city, and UAE-backed forces withdrew from southern Hudaydah; Houthi forces moved in to fill the vacuum. The withdrawal was partly a recognition that the offensive had not worked. Further clashes continued into late 2021, with attacks on coalition commanders like Ahmed Al-Kawkabani, a Tahama Brigades leader who survived an IED attempt on 24 November, and assassinations of coalition officers like Col. Farhan al-Saeedi of the Yemeni National Resistance, killed in a mine explosion on 18 December 2021. The April 2022 ceasefire closed what the 2018 offensive had opened, with the same city, somewhat more damaged, still home to its people, still the main humanitarian entry point for a country that has spent most of a decade at war.

Hudaydah has not known peace since. Israeli airstrikes in 2024 and 2025 struck the port and its fuel infrastructure repeatedly. The United States and United Kingdom have bombed Houthi targets in the city during the Red Sea crisis. Each time, a civilian population that had nothing to do with the geopolitical decisions being made absorbed the consequences. The port rebuilds. The city rebuilds. The ships carrying aid still dock when they can. The Hudaydah offensive - viewed narrowly as a military campaign between 2017 and 2022 - is one chapter in what has become a much longer story about a Yemeni city whose strategic importance has made it a target for more than a decade, and whose ordinary residents have endured the full weight of that importance.