From Dubai:
On a normal late-February weekend, Dubai International Airport hums with the organised chaos of peak tourist season: queues at Emirates check-in desks, children dragging hand luggage, couples bound for European city breaks. On Saturday night, passengers were running through smoke-filled corridors, furniture and debris scattered across concourses that hours earlier had been pristine. The world's busiest international airport had become a target.
The scenes, captured on video and shared by witnesses across social media, mark a turning point for a city that has spent decades positioning itself as the Middle East's safe, neutral crossroads. CNN reports that passengers evacuated Terminal 3 at Dubai International (DXB) after a reported Iranian drone strike, with the airport confirming that a concourse sustained minor damage and four staff were injured. A second explosion near the airport followed in the early hours of Sunday morning, sending a thick column of black smoke into the sky above one of the world's most recognisable skylines.
The strikes on Dubai are part of a sweeping Iranian retaliatory campaign triggered by joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran beginning on 28 February. Those attacks, which US President Donald Trump publicly confirmed on social media, killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior military and intelligence officials, according to multiple international reports. Iran responded with a sustained barrage targeting US military bases and Gulf nations considered aligned with Washington.
According to the UAE's Ministry of Defence, Iran fired 165 ballistic missiles, two cruise missiles and 541 drones at the country. Most were intercepted, but 21 drones reached civilian targets. The iconic Burj Al Arab hotel caught fire after drone debris struck the building; guests were evacuated before the blaze was brought under control. At Jebel Ali Port, one of the UAE's busiest commercial facilities, falling debris sparked a fire that burned into the early hours of Sunday. At Abu Dhabi's Zayed International Airport, a drone interception resulted in falling debris that killed one Pakistani national and injured seven others, as reported by 9News and confirmed by Euronews.
The human cost is measured not in statistics but in the paralysis settling over a city that had no public bomb shelters to offer its terrified residents. As reported by 7News, one Australian expat described the terror of watching missiles tracked across the Dubai skyline, uncertain how afraid to be. That uncertainty, the sense of not knowing whether the next sound was a firework or something far worse, captures the experience of the hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals suddenly marooned in a country under fire.
Many Dubai residents spent Saturday night in underground car parks, laying mattresses on concrete floors. Parents told young children that the blasts overhead were Ramadan fireworks; others filmed intercept trails from balconies and rooftops, their videos conveying a detached disbelief. Dubai, as CNN observed, was almost unrecognisable: highways empty, skies cleared of the constant stream of arriving aircraft that defines the city's pulse.
Australians Stranded Across the Region
For Australians, the practical consequences are severe and worsening. According to 9News, at least 1,200 flights were cancelled out of Dubai International on Sunday alone. There were five cancellations on Sydney services bound for Dubai or Qatar, seven from Melbourne, three from Adelaide and one from Perth, with airlines warning those numbers would shift throughout the day. Australian traveller Penny Milton was among those stranded, left stuck in Qatar with no immediate path home, 9News reported.
Australia's Smartraveller service has raised its travel advice for the UAE to its highest level, "Do Not Travel", citing the volatile security situation. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade noted that airspace closures had left many Australians unable to depart, that road and land border crossings may also be restricted, and that Australian officials in the UAE are sheltering in place. DFAT estimates up to 15,000 Australians are currently in the affected region, including dual citizens and expatriates working in the Gulf's aviation and energy sectors.
The broader aviation disruption extends well beyond those physically in the Middle East. Flightradar24 data showed the main east-west air corridor over Iraq, one of the busiest aviation routes linking Asia and Europe, almost completely empty on Sunday morning. Emirates suspended all operations indefinitely, Etihad extended cancellations through early Monday, and Qatar Airways halted all flights from Doha. The three major Gulf carriers normally carry around 90,000 passengers daily through those hubs, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. More than 1,800 flights in and out of the Middle East were cancelled on Saturday, with another 1,400 scrapped for Sunday, Cirium added.
Qantas flight QF9, the direct Perth-to-London service, was forced to take a lengthy detour over Southeast Asia and Central Asia, requiring a refuelling stop in Singapore and adding nearly four hours to the journey time, Travel and Tour World reported. European carriers including Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways also cancelled or rerouted services.
A Region That Traded on Stability
The strikes challenge something more than infrastructure. The Gulf built its modern identity on the promise of safe neutrality: a place where money, trade and people could move freely, insulated from the conflicts that have periodically consumed neighbouring states. That proposition is now in serious question.
Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told NPR that Tehran sees this as a war imposed on it. "This is an unjust war imposed on our nation, and we have no other choice other than fighting against this injustice," Baghaei said. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps announced it was carrying out retaliatory attacks on US military bases across the region, and on Sunday Tehran threatened what it described as its largest wave of strikes yet, also announcing the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for a significant share of global oil trade.
Critics of the US-Israeli operation, including Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, have condemned the strikes as a "reckless" act of aggression, warning of a humanitarian and economic catastrophe. The United Nations and several non-aligned states also criticised the initial strikes as destabilising. These are not frivolous objections. The killing of a head of state by a foreign military power, however authoritarian that leader may have been, sets a precedent with implications that extend far beyond Tehran. Iran was engaged in indirect nuclear negotiations with the US as recently as 6 February, meeting in Oman's capital Muscat; the abrupt shift to military action will unsettle governments that regard diplomacy as the only reliable path to de-escalation.
At the same time, the scale of Iran's retaliatory strikes, targeting civilian airports, luxury hotels and a port full of commercial shipping, has drawn condemnation from Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, which described the attacks as a "blatant violation" of their sovereignty. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the initial US-Israeli operation, Iran's decision to fire missiles and drones at civilian transit hubs across multiple neighbouring countries, some of which had explicitly closed their airspace as a gesture of non-alignment, represents a serious breach of the norms that underpin international civil aviation and commerce.
What Comes Next for Australian Travellers
For the Australians caught up in this, the immediate priorities are straightforward: shelter, communication and patience. Smartraveller advises those in the UAE to prioritise safety, monitor local media and follow instructions to shelter in place. Australian citizens and permanent residents in Israel, Iran, the UAE and Qatar can register with DFAT to receive direct updates. The Consular Emergency Centre can be reached on +61 2 6261 3305 from overseas.
The broader question, how long the airspace closures last and whether the conflict escalates further, remains unanswered. Aviation security analyst Eric Schouten told Al Jazeera that "passengers and airlines can expect airspace to be shut for quite some time." Iran's closure of its own airspace has been extended until at least 3 March, with further extensions flagged as likely. The situation is evolving rapidly and any assessment offered today may be out of date within hours.
What is clear is that the era in which Australians could treat Dubai and Doha as frictionless gateways to the world has, at least temporarily, ended. The question of whether it can be restored, and at what cost, will depend on decisions made in Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran, none of which have shown much inclination toward restraint in the past 72 hours. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the US-Israeli strikes were justified as a matter of strategic necessity; what is harder to dispute is that the consequences, for aviation, for regional commerce, and for the tens of thousands of ordinary people caught in the middle, are very real and very immediate.