The Man Who Watched the Ships: Yemen's Fishermen and the War That Won't End

On a Tuesday morning in February 2026, Saleh Abdo Al-Mahdi was standing in the remains of what used to be a fish market. The concrete floor had been swept clean, though there was nothing to sell. Saleh had not taken his boat out in nineteen days. The diesel cost more than any catch could justify, and the coalition's maritime restrictions meant that even if he found fish, he might not find his way home.

He was fifty-three years old. His father had been a fisherman. His grandfather had been a fisherman. For four hundred years, the Al-Mahdi family had worked the waters off Hodeidah, on Yemen's Red Sea coast. Now Saleh owned a wooden boat that he could not use, in a port that barely functioned, in a country that the world had largely stopped watching.

"The sea is the same," he told me, speaking through a translator over a satellite phone connection that kept cutting out. "The fish are still there. But we cannot reach them. And when we can reach them, we cannot afford to."

The Road to the Coast

To understand how Saleh arrived at this moment—standing in an empty market, watching boats rot in the harbor—requires understanding what has happened to Yemen's western coastline since 2015. The Saudi-led coalition's intervention, launched to restore the internationally recognized government after Houthi forces seized Sanaa, turned Hodeidah into a strategic chokepoint. The port handled roughly seventy percent of Yemen's imports. Control of it meant control of the country's survival.

The coalition imposed a naval blockade. The Houthis planted mines in the harbor. By 2018, when United Nations negotiators brokered the Stockholm Agreement to demilitarize Hodeidah, Saleh had already lost two nephews—one to an airstrike, one to starvation. The agreement held, barely. The port reopened, partially. The fishing industry, which had once employed more than half a million Yemenis along the coast, never recovered.

Saleh's own boat, a traditional wooden sambuk that his father had built in 1987, survived the worst years through a combination of luck and caution. He kept it hidden in a lagoon north of the city when the fighting was fiercest. He bribed militia members when necessary. He learned to read the patterns of coalition surveillance, to know which waters were patrolled and when.

"You become like a criminal," he said. "Fishing in your own waters, in the waters your family has always fished, and you feel like a smuggler."

What the Restrictions Mean

The formal mechanisms that constrain Yemeni fishermen are multiple and overlapping. The Saudi-led coalition maintains a verification and inspection mechanism for commercial vessels entering Hodeidah. Fishing boats fall into a gray zone—technically exempt from the full inspection regime, practically subject to unpredictable enforcement. Fishermen describe being detained at sea for hours, sometimes days, while their catch spoils in the heat.

The Houthis, meanwhile, have conscripted fishing vessels for military purposes—surveillance, weapons transport, mine-laying operations. Fishermen who refuse face consequences. Those who comply become legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law. It is a trap with no clear exit.

The economic calculus has become impossible. Diesel prices in Hodeidah, when fuel is available, run three to four times the prewar rate. Fishing nets, imported from India and China, have become luxury items. The few functioning ice plants charge rates that eat into whatever profit a fisherman might make. And then there is the simple matter of risk: Saleh knows of at least seven boats from his community that went out in the past three years and never returned.

"Three were hit by airstrikes," he said. "Two hit mines. Two, we never learned what happened to them."

A Country That Runs on Imports

Yemen imported ninety percent of its food even before the war. The fishing industry was not merely livelihood; it was one of the few sources of domestic protein production in a country otherwise dependent on the global market. The collapse of that industry has made an already catastrophic food security situation measurably worse.

The World Food Programme has repeatedly warned of famine conditions in Hodeidah governorate. In December 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification—the global standard for measuring hunger—rated several coastal districts at Phase 4, one step below famine. The fishing communities, ironically located on waters abundant with fish, face some of the highest rates of acute malnutrition.

Saleh's own family has survived on a combination of remittances from a brother in Saudi Arabia—money that arrives erratically, subject to the whims of transfer restrictions—and occasional humanitarian distributions. His wife sells bread when she can afford flour. His eldest daughter, who is twenty-six, has not been able to find work since finishing university in Sanaa four years ago.

What the Documents Show

The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, in its most recent report to the Security Council, documented 147 incidents involving fishing vessels between January 2023 and October 2025. Forty-three involved coalition forces detaining fishermen. Twenty-nine involved Houthi forces confiscating boats or equipment. Seventeen involved unexploded ordnance or sea mines. The panel noted that "the cumulative effect of these incidents has been the near-total collapse of commercial fishing activity along Yemen's Red Sea coast."

The Saudi-led coalition has consistently denied targeting fishing vessels, attributing reported incidents to Houthi military activity or, in some cases, to fishermen straying into restricted waters. The Houthis have denied using fishing boats for military purposes, though UN investigators have documented multiple instances of exactly that practice. Neither party to the conflict has shown meaningful interest in protecting the fishing communities caught between them.

International humanitarian law is clear on the protection of civilian fishermen. Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions explicitly includes fishing vessels among protected objects. The UN Secretary-General's 2024 report on the protection of civilians noted that "parties to the conflict in Yemen have repeatedly failed to distinguish between civilian fishing activity and military operations, resulting in unacceptable levels of civilian harm."

The Others

Saleh is not unique. He is one of an estimated 1.7 million Yemenis whose livelihoods depended directly or indirectly on the fishing industry before the war. Many have left the coast entirely, joining the massive internal displacement that has scattered Yemen's population. Others have attempted to cross the Red Sea to Djibouti or Eritrea, often dying in the attempt. Some have been absorbed into the war economy—joining militias, working at checkpoints, finding whatever survival mechanism presents itself.

In the village of Al-Fazzah, south of Hodeidah, a fisherman named Mohammed Qassem told a researcher from the International Crisis Group that he had not been able to take his boat out since 2022, when coalition forces destroyed it during a patrol. He now works intermittently as a day laborer, when there is work. His three sons have scattered—one to Aden, one to Marib, one he has not heard from in eighteen months.

"The sea gave us everything," Qassem told the researcher. "And then the war took the sea away."

Still Waiting

The UN-brokered truce that began in April 2022 has held, imperfectly, for nearly four years now. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have engaged in direct negotiations, mediated by Oman, that have produced incremental progress—prisoner exchanges, partial lifting of restrictions, occasional gestures toward a permanent settlement. But the fundamental issues remain unresolved: the Houthis' demand for recognition as Yemen's legitimate government, the internationally recognized government's insistence on their disarmament, the question of who controls the ports and the revenue they generate.

For fishermen like Saleh, the truce has meant slightly better conditions—fewer airstrikes, somewhat more predictable fuel supplies—but not a return to anything resembling normal life. The maritime restrictions remain in place. The mines remain in the water. The infrastructure remains destroyed.

The last time I spoke with Saleh, in early March, he was contemplating taking his boat out again. The diesel price had dropped slightly. A rumor had circulated that the coalition was easing enforcement in certain zones. His brother's remittance had not arrived, and the family was running low on food.

"I will go tomorrow, inshallah," he said. "Or the day after. When the conditions are right."

The conditions, of course, have not been right for a very long time.