分类： world

For more than a decade, Dubai has reigned as one of the world’s most iconic global tourism and business hubs, drawing millions of international visitors, transiting passengers and foreign investors drawn to its reputation as a stable, conflict-free oasis in the Middle East. But today, that standing is facing an unprecedented threat, sparked by escalating regional conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran that has sent tourism numbers plummeting, triggered widespread hotel shutdowns and mass job losses across the emirate’s critical hospitality sector.

New data released by Dubai Airports this week underscores the severity of the downturn. First-quarter 2026 passenger traffic fell by a minimum of 2.5 million compared to the same period in 2025, with March alone seeing a staggering 66% drop in arrivals as international travelers deliberately avoid the Gulf amid rising security fears. The sharp decline comes in the wake of Iran’s retaliatory drone and missile strikes against Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states that host or cooperate closely with U.S. military forces, a escalation that followed months of rising tensions across the region.

In a urgent bid to reverse the collapse in visitor numbers, UAE authorities announced Saturday that all air travel restrictions imposed after Iran’s strikes have been fully lifted. The country’s Civil Aviation Authority confirmed the decision in an official post on its X account, noting the move followed a full review of operational and security conditions conducted in coordination with local security agencies. The policy shift is widely interpreted as a deliberate signal to reassure jittery international travelers, particularly after multiple major European carriers announced temporary suspensions of all flights to the Middle East over safety and insurance concerns.

Despite the government’s confidence-building move, hospitality workers, business owners and long-term residents who spoke to Middle East Eye – all speaking on condition of anonymity due to GCC-wide restrictions on public discussion of the impact of Iran’s actions – caution it will take time to rebuild trust among both travelers and foreign investors.

Charity, a Kenyan employee at a mid-range Dubai hotel operated by a U.S.-based chain, described the immediate fallout of the escalation, which coincided with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when tensions were at their highest. During the peak of the strikes, the hotel was filled not with leisure tourists, but with stranded airline passengers waiting to rebook with Emirates, who gathered in the lobby to meet with airline representatives. As a security precaution, the property closed its popular pool and relocated all guests from the 20-story building’s upper floors to lower levels by the end of the month. In the weeks that followed, she said, business slowed to a near standstill.

Charity says she holds out hope that the lifting of travel restrictions will reassure visitors to return, but is waiting to see tangible recovery in the coming weeks. “We’ll see over the next week if people really start to come back,” she said during a recent shift assisting a long-time American guest. “We need your people [foreign tourists] to come back.”

The dramatic slump in traffic is immediately visible even to frequent travelers at Dubai International, which has held the title of the world’s busiest airport for international passenger traffic for 12 straight years. Samina, a South Asian NGO worker who regularly travels between South Asia, the Gulf and North America, said the emptiness of the airport’s terminals is striking compared to just two months ago.

“Coming in, it’s empty,” she said of Terminal 3, Emirates’ main hub. “Terminal 1 and 2 are ghost towns,” she added, referring to the terminals that house other international carriers and UAE-based budget airline FlyDubai. As of the latest update from Dubai Airports, only 51 of the 90 airlines that normally operate out of the airport have resumed regular services. European and U.S. carriers have faced particular barriers to returning, as many struggle to secure affordable insurance coverage for operations in the region amid official government travel advisories warning against non-essential travel.

To shore up morale among residents and project an image of stability, Dubai’s local government has launched a public outreach campaign across the emirate. UAE flags are displayed prominently outside homes, commercial buildings, and on digital billboards along major highways. At the popular City Walk shopping mall, large electronic screens display messages thanking UAE residents in both Arabic and English. Portraits of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan line major arterial roads, paired with the message: “May our nation remain in God’s protection,” while other displays feature Emirati families saluting the national flag with the same wording.

Even with these public efforts, the economic impact of the regional tensions has been felt almost immediately across nearly all sectors, business owners say. Tatiana, a Russian entrepreneur who runs a logistics and consulting firm helping foreign businesses set up operations in the Gulf, said she was shocked by how rapidly investor and resident confidence collapsed. “Within the first two weeks people [said] it’s no longer worth [living here]. They weren’t scared per se, they just felt like it’s no longer worth it,” she explained. Many businesses moved quickly to liquidate their assets, and Tatiana said her own family is now exploring relocation options in Europe to shift their operations gradually.

The ripple effects of the downturn have even reached industries not immediately associated with tourism and international travel. Antoine, an editor who trains new writers, shared that one of his clients, an employee at a local advertising agency, was tasked with laying off 1,000 workers in the UAE following widespread business liquidations. “You’d think advertising would be a war-proof industry,” he noted, expressing surprise at how quickly the sector was impacted.

For Tatiana, the damage strikes at the core of what makes Dubai’s business ecosystem work: “Our whole business is predicated on assuring people that the UAE is a safe, convenient place to do business,” she said. That sentiment is echoed by Arjun, one of the 3.5 to 4.3 million Indian expatriates who call the UAE home, who spoke after attending a late-night screening of the Michael Jackson biopic in Dubai. Arjun noted he was encouraged to see the theater nearly full, holding out hope it could signal a gradual return to normalcy – but acknowledged the damage to Dubai’s core brand has already been done. “The entire ethos of Dubai as this place free from conflict was shaken,” he said.

Most conventional discussions of threats to the global economy center on kinetic military strikes or large-scale cyberattacks on onshore data infrastructure. But a far stealthier, more destabilizing risk is now building in one of the world’s most strategically critical waterways: a coordinated sabotage campaign targeting the fiber-optic cables that crisscross the Persian Gulf seabed — infrastructure that underpins nearly all of the world’s digital and financial activity.

Recent escalations in the Middle East carry global ramifications that extend far beyond energy security, requiring urgent attention from policymakers worldwide. Iran has already disrupted oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s busiest and most important energy chokepoint, via maritime mining operations. Now, analysts warn that a quieter, far more consequential threat is unfolding.

On April 22, 2026, Iranian media outlets linked to the Iranian government published detailed public maps of undersea cable routes, coastal landing stations, and key regional data hubs spanning the Persian Gulf. Analysts from *The Jerusalem Post* have assessed that these public disclosures are not accidental: they represent deliberate target preparation for future sabotage.

To grasp the scale of this risk, it is necessary to confront a little-known fact that shapes the entire global digital ecosystem: over 97% of all cross-border internet traffic travels not through orbital satellites, but through thin fiber-optic cables laid across ocean floors. These strands, no thicker than a standard garden hose, facilitate an estimated $10 trillion in global financial transactions every single day. They are the foundational infrastructure for bank transfers, stock market operations, cloud computing services, and the AI systems that are increasingly integrated into every sector of the modern global economy. Even with advances in satellite technology, satellites lack the bandwidth to replace even a fraction of this capacity if major cable networks are disabled.

Geographic chokepoints amplify this vulnerability dramatically. At least 17 major undersea cable systems pass through the Red Sea, with several additional core routes traversing the Persian Gulf. These are not backup redundant lines — they are the primary digital arteries connecting Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Both regions are already plagued by ongoing conflict, and their narrow channels mean a single well-executed cable cut can send shockwaves across every inhabited continent.

This threat is not hypothetical: there is a clear, documented precedent for this exact pattern of aggression. In February 2024, Yemen’s Houthi movement published a public plan on the messaging platform Telegram outlining its intent to target undersea cables connecting Europe and Asia via the Red Sea. That same day, *Foreign Policy* magazine noted that even if the Houthis lacked the independent technical capacity to carry out such an attack, Iran could easily supply the required equipment and expertise. The warning was explicit and credible, but the global community largely ignored it.

Less than three weeks later, the warnings became reality. On February 26, 2024, four undersea cables linking Saudi Arabia and Djibouti were severed in a deliberate act of sabotage, matching the pre-attack public signaling the Houthis had already provided. The pattern was unambiguous: public threat disclosure and target mapping, followed by immediate offensive action. Today, that same pattern is repeating — this time targeting infrastructure that connects the entire global digital system, not just a regional network.

Over the past decade, the Middle East has evolved from a primarily energy-focused global hub to a critical digital infrastructure hub as well. The region now hosts more than 300 data centers across 18 countries, with tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google investing billions of dollars in cloud facilities based in the Persian Gulf. A widespread cable cut would not just disrupt email and casual web browsing: it would strand hundreds of billions of dollars in digital infrastructure overnight, and could effectively shut down large swations of the global economy, since nearly all modern daily commerce, banking, and investment activity depends on continuous, high-volume internet connectivity.

What makes this threat uniquely difficult to deter is also what makes it so attractive to Iran: near-perfect plausible deniability. A missile strike is an unambiguous act of aggression that would trigger immediate diplomatic and military retaliation. But a cargo vessel dragging an anchor across a cable off the coast of the Strait of Hormuz is far more ambiguous. Was it an accidental navigational error? A fishing boat that drifted off its planned course? A proxy force operating with discreet backing from Tehran?

By the time investigators can untangle these questions — a process made even slower by the fact that cable repair vessels cannot safely operate in active conflict zones — the damage is already done. Entire global regions can remain cut off from core digital services for weeks or even months, with cascading economic consequences.

Compounding this vulnerability is the astonishingly weak international legal framework meant to deter this type of sabotage. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), if an undersea cable is damaged in international waters, legal jurisdiction to prosecute the perpetrator falls to the perpetrator’s home country, not the state or company that owns the cable. The outcome of this framework is predictable: no state has ever been prosecuted for a deliberate cable cut, and no case of sabotage has ever been adjudicated in an international court. When states operate through proxy groups, as Iran regularly does, confirming attribution becomes even more difficult, and the threshold for meaningful retaliation is almost never met.

In 2024, the United States and more than two dozen allied nations signed the New York Joint Statement on undersea cable security, officially acknowledging the widespread vulnerability of this infrastructure. But a public acknowledgment of risk is not a deterrent, and no substantive enforcement measures have followed the statement.

To address this growing threat, policy experts argue that the international community needs a new, enforceable legal framework with real consequences. This framework would empower states that own cable infrastructure to pursue direct action against perpetrators regardless of their nationality, and would explicitly hold state sponsors accountable for attacks carried out through proxy groups. In the short term, since the U.S. already maintains a significant military presence in the Persian Gulf region, it can take immediate action to patrol and protect critical cable routes to reduce the risk of successful sabotage.

In 2024, the Houthis publicly signaled their intent to attack undersea cables, and the attacks followed shortly after. Today, Iran is engaging in the same pattern of public signaling, but for a potentially far more devastating attack that could cripple the global economy. The only open question is whether the United States and its global partners will act to prevent the attack — before the silent fall of the global digital network.

On May 4, severe heavy rain triggered a destructive river overflow in Bogor, a regency located in Indonesia’s West Java province, leaving a popular outdoor glamping facility completely ruined by fast-moving floodwaters.

Local reports confirm that the swelling river, pushed far beyond its banks by hours of intense downpour, unleashed a raging torrent that swept through the glamping site. The rushing water damaged infrastructure, destroyed luxury camping units, and forced any visitors or staff present to evacuate quickly. As of initial reports, no official casualties have been confirmed, but the facility has suffered extensive, irreversible damage that will take months to repair.

Bogor, which sits in a low-lying region near Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, is no stranger to seasonal flooding. The country’s tropical monsoon climate regularly brings intense rainfall between November and May, increasing the risk of river overflows and flash floods across low-lying and rural areas. This latest flood event comes as climate scientists have warned that rising global temperatures are intensifying extreme weather events across Southeast Asia, leading to more frequent and severe bouts of heavy rainfall and flooding that threaten communities, tourism infrastructure, and local livelihoods.

The glamping facility, which catered to nature-focused tourists looking for a luxury outdoor experience near Bogor’s popular forest and mountain attractions, was a popular weekend getaway for both domestic and international visitors. Local tourism officials have noted that the destruction of the site will have a short-term negative impact on the area’s small tourism-dependent businesses, which have only recently recovered from pandemic-related travel restrictions.

Three and a half years after the deadliest Chinese aviation disaster in decades, newly released U.S. investigation data has shed fresh light on the 2022 crash of China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, which claimed all 132 lives on board when the Boeing 737 plummeted into a hillside in southern China.

According to data obtained by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) via a Freedom of Information Act request, fuel flow to both of the jet’s engines was intentionally cut while the aircraft was cruising at 29,000 feet, a finding that lends credibility to unconfirmed theories that the crash was deliberate. The data, pulled from one of the plane’s recovered black boxes that was sent to the NTSB’s Washington D.C. lab for analysis, confirms that both engine fuel control switches were manually moved to the “cut-off” position, after which the engines’ rotational speeds dropped sharply.

Fuel switches are purpose-built cockpit controls designed to regulate the flow of jet fuel into the engines, used almost exclusively by flight crew to start engines during pre-flight preparation or shut them down after landing. No mechanical malfunction is known to automatically shift both fully functional fuel switches into the cut-off position during cruise flight.

The timeline of the disaster, recorded by independent flight tracking service FlightRadar24, aligns with the new data: on March 21, 2022, the flight departed Kunming, Yunnan’s provincial capital, on a routine scheduled domestic trip to Guangzhou, southern China’s major trade hub. After more than an hour of uneventful flight, the aircraft suddenly entered an uncontrolled, rapid descent. In just two minutes and 15 seconds, it dropped from a cruising altitude of 29,100 feet to under 10,000 feet, with its final recorded altitude logged at 3,225 feet at 14:22 local time. Air traffic controllers made repeated attempts to contact the flight crew during the descent but received no response.

China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA), which is leading the official investigation into the crash, has yet to publish a final public report, justifying the delay on grounds of national security concerns. Shortly after the crash, CAA officials confirmed that the flight crew held valid operating licenses, had passed required pre-flight health checks, and were properly rested, ruling out basic fatigue or certification issues. When media speculation emerged that the crash was an act of pilot suicide, the CAA issued an official denial, stating that such baseless rumors misled the public and disrupted the ongoing investigation.

As the aircraft was manufactured by American aerospace firm Boeing, the NTSB was granted authority to assign a senior investigator to assist the Chinese-led probe, a standard arrangement for international aviation accident investigations. Prior to the release of the NTSB data, the disaster’s cause had remained a subject of global speculation, with possible causes ranging from structural failure and mid-air collision to pilot error and deliberate action. The new NTSB findings are the first official verified data to publicly support the deliberate action theory, though Chinese authorities have not yet commented on the newly released information.

China has seen dramatic improvements in commercial aviation safety over the past three decades, with fatal air crashes remaining extremely rare. The 2022 MU5735 crash was the deadliest air disaster to occur in Chinese airspace since 1992.

Just one month after agreeing to a fragile ceasefire with the United States, Iran has dramatically escalated tensions across the Persian Gulf by launching a coordinated barrage of missiles and drones against the United Arab Emirates, marking the first major assault on a Gulf Cooperation Council state in the post-ceasefire era. The large-scale attack has triggered immediate warnings from Abu Dhabi that it reserves the right to launch retaliatory action, stoking fears of a wider regional conflict.

In an official statement released following the assault, the UAE’s foreign ministry condemned the operation as a reckless and unacceptable escalation that directly undermines the sovereignty, security and territorial stability of the country. “These attacks represent a dangerous escalation and an unacceptable transgression, posing a direct threat to the state’s security, stability, and the safety of its territories,” the statement read, confirming that the Emirates would exercise its full legitimate right to respond to the unprovoked aggression.

The assault unfolded shortly after the United States unveiled a new maritime security plan to escort commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the critical chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s global oil supplies pass daily. Iranian state-run Fars News Agency initially claimed that Iranian military forces had struck a U.S. warship with two anti-ship missiles while the vessel was traversing the strategic waterway. That claim was swiftly rejected by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who clarified Monday that only a South Korean-flagged vessel had been damaged in the incident. Trump added that U.S. forces had destroyed seven Iranian fast-attack craft operating in the area, a statement that Tehran quickly denied. U.S. Central Command also issued a formal rebuttal of Fars News’ report of a struck American warship.

According to the UAE’s defense ministry, at least four cruise missiles were launched toward Emirati territory from Iranian soil. The country’s integrated air defense systems intercepted and destroyed three of the incoming projectiles, while the fourth missile impacted harmlessly in the open waters of the Gulf. A separate drone attack, however, ignited a blaze at an energy facility located in Fujairah, the UAE’s critical Indian Ocean port that serves as a key export hub for Emirati oil that avoids passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Local civil defense teams were deployed to the site within minutes of the attack. “Fujairah Civil Defence teams immediately responded to the incident and are continuing their efforts to control it,” the Fujairah media office confirmed in an update. Three Indian nationals working at the facility sustained moderate injuries in the strike, the Emirati federal government confirmed.

The spillover from the attack extended to neighboring Oman, where local authorities reported two people were injured after a strike targeted a residential building in Bukha. The town of Bukha, which lends its name to the surrounding Omani province, sits in an Omani exclave along the Gulf coast, just northwest of the Emirate of Fujairah, putting it in the direct path of projectiles launched toward the UAE.

Monday’s coordinated strikes have upended the tentative de-escalation that followed last month’s U.S.-Iran ceasefire, with regional powers already moving to reinforce military positions and issue diplomatic condemnations. The incident also underscores the persistent volatility of the Gulf region, even amid diplomatic efforts to reduce the risk of open conflict between Iran and Western-aligned Gulf states.

Leaked closed-door comments from the head of Israeli military forces in the occupied West Bank have laid bare the staggering scale of Palestinian fatalities under current operational policies, with the commander admitting killings have reached a level unmatched since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz has reported.

Major General Avi Bluth, a West Bank settler who took command of the Israeli Army’s Central Command in 2024, made the explosive remarks during a closed forum, where he also defended relaxed rules of engagement that grant troops broad permission to open fire on unarmed Palestinian civilians. In a striking admission of systemic bias, Bluth confirmed that Israeli troops operate a discriminatory policy: Jewish Israelis who throw stones at security forces are never targeted with lethal force, while Palestinians who carry out the same actions are shot to kill.

Claiming credit for the high death toll, Bluth stated that over a three-year period, Israeli forces had killed 1,500 people he labeled as “terrorists” — a term his command applies broadly to Palestinian individuals. Puzzling over the absence of large-scale popular unrest against Israeli occupation, he said, “So how is there no intifada? Why aren’t they taking to the streets? Why is the Palestinian public indifferent? Why are there no disturbances?” He went on to attribute the lack of mass uprisings to the deterrence created by the harsh crackdown, arguing, “The Arabs understand that ‘if someone rises to kill you, kill him first’ is part of the rules of the Middle East, and therefore we are killing like we have not killed since 1967.”

Official data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) backs up the severity of the current surge in fatalities: since October 7, 2023 alone, Israeli forces have killed 1,081 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, including at least 235 children. Bluth explicitly linked the rising death toll to his own orders, which removed previous restrictions on soldiers opening fire on civilians. He detailed one policy that permits troops to shoot Palestinian people attempting to cross the West Bank separation barrier from the knee down, saying, “Today, there are many ‘limping memorials’ in Palestinian villages of those who tried to infiltrate and got hit, so there is a price that is paid.”

When pressed on the double standard applied to Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers, Bluth cited “sociological implications” as the reason his forces do not target Israelis engaging in the same activity he frames as terrorism for Palestinians. He confirmed that in 2025 alone, Israeli forces killed 42 Palestinians accused of throwing stones. When shown footage of extremist Israeli settlers throwing stones at troops, he pointed to a single incident in which two masked Israelis were shot, noting that the incident sparked a massive public outcry that would prevent similar action going forward.

Bluth’s comments have emerged against a backdrop of growing tension between his command and extremist, hilltop settler militias that routinely carry out attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. These militant settlers see Bluth as too soft, claiming he has bowed to pressure from left-wing Israeli groups and the international community. Last week, Haaretz reported that Bluth had publicly labeled rising settler violence against Palestinians as “terror,” and criticized unauthorized outposts built by hilltop youth without prior military coordination. Even so, Bluth also acknowledged that the military, working in coordination with settler groups, has established roughly 150 new unauthorized outposts in Area C of the West Bank over recent years. He claimed these outposts help prevent what he calls Palestinian “terror” and block Palestinian residential expansion.

The commander’s remarks have already sparked political backlash: Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech, a prominent backer of settler militias, has publicly called on Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz to immediately dismiss Bluth from his post.

Parallel to the political firestorm over Bluth’s comments, Israeli anti-settlement NGO Peace Now released a new report Sunday exposing that the Israeli government has allocated 130 million shekels (roughly $35 million) to the same settler groups responsible for frequent violence against Palestinians, under the false pretense of curbing settler violence. Official government documents frame the funding as aimed at “reducing risk situations and expanding positive responses for youth in the Judea and Samaria area” — the official Israeli terminology for the occupied West Bank. But Peace Now says the funding will in reality go toward expanding existing Israeli settlements and directing millions of public shekels to settler regional councils.

In an official statement, Peace Now said, “The government uses every excuse to justify pouring more and more millions into settlements. This is a programme to expand settlements under the guise of combating violence.” The organization added that the government is directing most of the budget to the very groups and activities that are the primary backers of the unauthorized outposts and settler farms from which most anti-Palestinian violence originates, and called on the government to cancel the funding allocation while demanding the military and police crack down on ongoing settler violence.

This report was originally carried by independent Middle Eastern news outlet Middle East Eye, which provides exclusive, unfiltered coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.