Al Hudaydah sits on the western coast of Yemen, on the Tihamah coastal plain overlooking the Red Sea. Its harbor cranes - all four of them - handle the containers of rice, wheat, cooking oil, and medicine that most of Yemen depends on to stay alive. By 2018, three quarters of all humanitarian and commercial cargo entering the country moved through Hudaydah. The Saudi-led coalition argued that Iranian-supplied weapons and missiles also came through the port, funding the Houthi war effort. Houthi authorities said the port was a civilian lifeline being used by the coalition as a pretext. The World Health Organization recorded Hudaydah Governorate as having one of the highest child malnutrition rates in Yemen. In a war that had already killed thousands and displaced millions, a battle here was going to cost lives regardless of who won.

The United Arab Emirates had proposed a naval attack on Hudaydah in 2016, but the United States had judged it too risky at the time. Over the next two years the UAE trained thousands of Yemeni government soldiers at bases in Eritrea and along the Tihamah, and on 13 June 2018 approximately 2,000 Emirati troops attacked the coastal approaches, supported by coalition airstrikes. A CARE aid worker in the city counted at least 30 airstrikes on the first day. The target on paper was Hodeida International Airport, a few miles south of the city center, where coalition commanders believed they could isolate the Houthis from their supply lines without entering populated neighborhoods. The airport was reported captured on 16 June, then contested, then captured again. Houthi prisoners of war, according to coalition commander Tareq Saleh, had been coerced into fighting under threats against their families. The battle lasted weeks, then months.

While the airport fell and the outer neighborhoods were fought over, the city itself suffered. Water supply pipes were damaged by Houthi trench-digging. Electricity became intermittent. On 4 August, a coalition airstrike killed 30 people near the Hudaydah fish market and a nearby hospital - the coalition disputed the claim. On 31 August, a Saudi airstrike hit three fishing boats off Uqban Island; initial reports put 70 fishermen missing, later reports revised the number to 19. On 13 August, coalition airstrikes on a bus killed dozens of children. Whatever the battle's military logic, the civilian casualty figures became the metric that mattered. Peace talks scheduled for Geneva in September collapsed when the Houthis did not appear, demanding the UN medically evacuate their wounded as a precondition. In November, the coalition reinitiated the offensive.

In December 2018, UN special envoy Martin Griffiths convened both sides in Sweden and brokered the Stockholm Agreement, calling for the mutual withdrawal of forces from Hudaydah city and port under UN monitoring. The ceasefire went into effect on 18 December. It was never fully implemented. Throughout 2019 and 2020, pro-government forces accused the Houthis of holding positions they had agreed to leave, while Houthi forces accused the coalition of continuing airstrikes and naval blockade pressure. The UN Mission in Support of the Hodeidah Agreement, UNMHA, operated inside the city under difficult conditions. A handful of prisoner exchanges happened. The port continued to operate, barely. In November 2021, pro-government forces withdrew from their positions on the outskirts of Hudaydah entirely, ceding the city fully back to the Houthis. Operation Golden Victory had changed nothing about who controlled the port, and had cost thousands of civilian lives doing so.

The people of Hudaydah knew what was happening to them, even when the world looked elsewhere. Fishermen went out anyway and got blown out of the water. Families packed onto trucks and fled inland when they could. Children were malnourished because the port that fed them was a battlefield. Humanitarian agencies - CARE, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, Medecins Sans Frontieres - kept supplies moving when they could and issued reports when they could not. The combatants on both sides told simple stories about each other: heroic defenders and criminal invaders, terrorists and liberators. The civilians of Hudaydah told a more honest one, in interviews with Al Jazeera and the BBC and human rights groups: everyone who carried a gun here was a problem, and what we wanted was for everyone with a gun to leave. Seven years later, the war continues in other forms - Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, Israeli airstrikes on the port, Saudi-led coalition strikes - and the people of Hudaydah are still waiting.