By Jamal Alawadhi — Paris

Standalone airstrikes have not shifted the balance of power with the Houthis as many had hoped. Attacks on Red Sea shipping continue, the cost of global trade is rising, and Houthi leadership remains buffered by underground networks and a dispersed footprint. If the goal is to reduce the Houthis’ capacity for maritime coercion and regional destabilization, then liberating Hodeidah—through a Yemeni-led effort with political and logistical backing from the United States and the United Kingdom—must be elevated to top priority.

What Makes Hodeidah a Decisive Target?

Hodeidah (along with Al-Salif and Ras Issa) is not just a port; it is a vital economic and humanitarian artery for Yemen. Previous UN estimates indicate that around 70% of the country’s imports and 80% of humanitarian aid passed through these ports at the height of the crisis—making control over them a decisive factor in financing the authorities in Sana’a and sustaining their resilience. The UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) manages vessel flows to these docks, which means that revising the port’s status and operating rules would rapidly affect revenue streams and logistics that the Houthis rely on.

Across 2023–2024, World Bank reporting documented a rising share of Yemen’s imports moving through Hodeidah compared with other ports such as Aden—bolstering the port’s weight in the northern economy and its ability to generate customs and fee revenues that feed the war effort. Research assessments drawing on UN Panel of Experts findings also pointed to billions of dollars in fuel revenues in Houthi-held areas in 2022.

Why Airstrikes Are Not Enough

Since January 2024, the United States and the United Kingdom have launched repeated strikes to curb Houthi attacks on shipping. The result has been tactically painful but strategically limited: temporary disruption of certain platforms, yet the maritime threat persisted and redeployments outpaced any lasting deterrent effect—while freight and insurance costs surged and shipping routes were forced into costly detours. In short, bombing hurts, but it does not uproot centers of gravity.

Compounding this, the Houthis have refined a fortified, distributed posture—tunnels, hardened shelters, underground depots—that blunts the impact of strikes focused on above-ground targets, a pattern highlighted in governmental and research assessments during the Red Sea crisis.

Why “Liberate Hodeidah” Now—with a US-UK Partnership?

Choke the resources, not just the symptoms. Seizing a logistics and revenue node as significant as Hodeidah would reshape the Houthis’ financing and economic legitimacy, rather than merely chasing scattered launch sites. That, in turn, weakens their ability to bankroll maritime attacks and constrains domestic levers of influence.

Link the maritime file to the ground reality. The Red Sea will not stabilize while the Houthis’ land power remains shielded by port-based revenues. Partnership with Washington and London who lead the maritime response and bear direct economic costs—provides the political and logistical umbrella to shift from sea-based deterrence to ground leverage at a single critical node.

Reduce Iranian enablement of logistics networks. UN experts and shipping intermediaries have documented Iranian technical and financial support. Recasting Hodeidah’s governance and revenue flows makes it harder to monetize those networks and narrows the payoff from illicit procurement.

Stockholm Is Not a Blank Check Forever

The Stockholm Agreement (2018) froze fighting in Hodeidah under UNMHA monitoring to avert a humanitarian disaster. But the context has changed: a cross-border threat to global shipping and a port turned into a financial and military lever for an actor undermining the international economy. Re-evaluating Hodeidah’s arrangements politically and legally has become necessary to safeguard both maritime security and food security, not to pit them against each other.

How to Liberate Without a Humanitarian Catastrophe

This is not a license to destroy; on the contrary, it is an operational-humanitarian liberation that converts the port from a war lever into a public good under neutral management, with US-UK guarantees to speed stabilization and prevent an aid collapse:

Keep the port running from Day One under a neutral, professional civil administration (in coordination with the UN) that maintains humanitarian and commercial flows, while tightening UNVIM with risk-based screening.

Protect civilian corridors with pre-planned evacuation routes and medical pathways to avoid predictable aid chokepoints during any flare up. 

(UN warnings have long underscored Hodeidah’s supply-chain fragility when logistics assets are damaged.)

Synchronize pressure on finance and smuggling networks (sanctions, shipment tracking, drying up front companies so that battlefield gains are matched by a squeeze on illicit resupply without blocking essential goods.

Why Washington and London?

Because they shoulder the heaviest burden in securing sea-lanes and possess the political heft and logistics to underwrite a carefully structured operation that balances ground effect with humanitarian safeguards. The record shows that airstrikes alone have not ended the Houthi threat. Shifting the center of effort to Hodeidah backed by the US and the UK—offers the most direct path to reducing maritime attacks, lowering insurance premia, and restoring the flow of trade.

Liberating Hodeidah is neither a “gamble” nor an “overreach”; it is a course correction in deterrence: striking at the financial-logistical core that feeds the war machine while keeping the humanitarian lung open under neutral stewardship.