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As escalating conflict between the U.S.-Israel bloc and Iran turns wealthy Gulf Arab states into potential targets for cross-border strikes, thousands of migrant workers who once powered these regional economies are fleeing, while those trapped navigate constant fear and upended life plans. For low-wage migrant workers who have built decades of livelihoods supporting their families back home, the sudden outbreak of violence has turned their pursuit of economic stability into a fight for survival.

Norma Tactacon, a 49-year-old Filipino domestic worker stranded in Doha, Qatar, has spent 20 years working across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to fund her children’s education. Her goal is simple: see her 23-year-old son graduate from a police academy and her two older daughters complete nursing degrees, qualifications that would open doors to high-paying overseas work that can lift her entire family out of poverty. The minimum wage for Filipino domestic workers in the Middle East hits $500 per month, four to five times the earnings of an equivalent role back in the Philippines – a gap that has kept Tactacon working far from home for decades. Now, as sirens wail and missile strikes make headlines across the region, she spends her days praying for safety. “I get scared and nervous every time I see pictures and videos of missiles in the air,” Tactacon told the BBC. “I need to be alive to be there for my family. I’m all that they have. I hope the world will be peaceful again and things go back to the way they were. I pray that the war will stop.” The conflict has forced her to reconsider her decades-long plan; she is now weighing a return to the Philippines to launch a small business with her husband, even if it means giving up the higher wages that have supported her family for years.

Tactacon’s uncertainty is shared by millions of migrant workers across the Gulf. Data from the International Labour Organisation puts the total number of migrant workers in the region at 24 million, making it the world’s top destination for cross-border labor migration. Most of these workers come from low- and middle-income South and Southeast Asian nations: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The ILO notes that the majority hold low-wage, precarious positions with limited access to healthcare or emergency support, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable when conflict breaks out.

Already, the conflict has claimed the lives of at least 12 South Asian migrant workers. Among them is 29-year-old Dibas Shrestha, a Nepali security guard based in Abu Dhabi. Shrestha had been saving for years to rebuild his parents’ family home, which was destroyed in the 2015 Nepal earthquake that killed hundreds. His uncle Ramesh had repeatedly urged him to return home, but Shrestha enjoyed his role and felt secure in Abu Dhabi, even dismissing early reports of escalating tensions as exaggerated. “We have many relatives who’ve moved to the Gulf for work, so we were very worried for all of them,” Ramesh told the BBC. “He was their only son. So kind, and very smart.” Shrestha was killed in an Iranian strike on Abu Dhabi on March 1.

Just 120 kilometers away in Dubai, 55-year-old Bangladeshi water tank supplier Ahmad Ali was killed by debris from an intercepted missile. Ali had worked in the UAE for years, sending $500 to $600 back to his family in Bangladesh every month – a sum that transforms the lives of working-class families in the low-income South Asian nation. His son Abdul Haque had joined him in Dubai before returning to Bangladesh before the conflict began. Ali, who did not own a smartphone and rarely followed the news, had no idea how serious the escalating tensions had become. “He really liked the people in Dubai, he said they were welcoming, that it was a great place to live,” Abdul said. “It’s not safe now, nobody wants to lose a father.”

Another early victim was 32-year-old Filipino caregiver Mary Ann Veolasquez, who was injured in a ballistic missile strike on her Tel Aviv apartment as she helped her patient reach safety.

As violence escalates, source nations across Asia have scrambled to repatriate their citizens. But widespread travel disruptions from missile threats have closed direct air routes from major Gulf hubs including Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, forcing evacuees to take long, overland detours to catch repatriation flights. As of March 23, the Philippine government has flown nearly 2,000 Filipino migrant workers and their dependents back to Manila. One recent repatriation flight required 234 workers from Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain to travel eight hours by land to Saudi Arabia to meet 109 other evacuees before boarding their flight home. Roughly half of the Philippines’ more than two million overseas workers are based in the Middle East, and their remittances account for 10% of the country’s total GDP, making the crisis both a humanitarian and economic threat for the nation.

Bangladesh faces similar stakes: most of its 14 million overseas migrant workers are based in the Middle East, and their remittances are a core pillar of the national economy. Since the conflict began, Dhaka has repatriated nearly 500 workers and arranged at least two additional evacuation flights from Bahrain.

For some migrant workers, however, leaving is not a viable option. Su Su, a 31-year-old operations specialist at a Dubai real estate firm, fled Myanmar’s ongoing civil war – which has gripped the country since the 2021 military coup – to build a new life in Dubai. For her, returning to Myanmar is not an option. She has adapted to the new risk of conflict in Dubai, working from home and keeping an emergency evacuation bag packed, a habit she developed during years of unrest in Myanmar. “This is just a habit I got from Myanmar,” she said. Even so, she remains cautiously optimistic: “The feeling here is more calm. I believe at the end of the day, we will be fine.”

As the conflict continues, the exodus of migrant workers is accelerating, with international tourists already avoiding the region entirely. For the millions of workers who built their lives in the Gulf chasing economic opportunity, what was once a path out of poverty has become a test of survival, with their futures and the fates of their families back home hanging in the balance.

In a shocking development that has sent ripples through the international community, a non-governmental organization representative to the United Nations announced his resignation Friday, stepping down to publicize explosive allegations that the global body is actively planning for a scenario involving the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

Mohamad Safa, who has served as the permanent UN representative for the Patriotic Vision Association (PVA) — an NGO granted special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc) — since 2016, and had led PVA as executive director since 2013, said he abandoned his decades-long diplomatic career specifically to disclose the information he encountered in his role. Safa claimed that a number of senior UN officials have prioritized advancing the interests of a powerful external lobbying bloc rather than upholding the core mission and values of the United Nations.

In a widely shared social media post accompanying an image of the Iranian capital Tehran, Safa launched a sharp rebuke of what he frames as war-mongering rhetoric from hawkish policymakers who have pushed for confrontation with Iran. “This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It’s not some low population desert,” he wrote. “There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You’re sick to want war. Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons.”

Safa emphasized the urgency and unprecedented gravity of the situation he is exposing: “I don’t think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran… I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity.”

Safa’s bombshell allegations come just days after top World Health Organization (WHO) officials confirmed they are already gearing up for a worst-case nuclear catastrophe scenario, should escalating U.S. and Israeli military action against Iran spiral into full-scale conflict. Speaking to Politico, WHO Regional Director Hanan Balkhy spelled out the organization’s deepest concerns: “The worst-case scenario is a nuclear incident… and that’s something that worries us the most.” Balkhy stressed that any nuclear event in the region would leave devastating, multi-generational consequences that would impact not just the Middle East, but the entire global community. She added that WHO planning covers all potential nuclear-related emergencies “in its broader sense,” including both targeted attacks on Iranian nuclear infrastructure and the direct deployment of nuclear weapons.

Balkhy’s warning is far from an isolated alarm. Just one week prior, Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), echoed grave concerns about the risk of nuclear weapons use in the current escalating conflict. When asked by Middle East Eye whether a nuclear strike against Iran could be ruled out completely, ElBaradei responded: “Should I one hundred percent exclude it? No. Do I pray every night that it doesn’t? Yes. If you have a crazy leader and they feel that they are losing, I don’t exclude it.”

Amid this mounting tension, Iranian political leaders have moved in recent days to debate withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), following intensified U.S. and Israeli strikes that have hit civilian Iranian nuclear sites. On Friday, Ebrahim Rezaei, spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s national security commission, argued that continued membership in the NPT holds no value for Iran, stating that the treaty “has had no benefit for us.”

Iran has been a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT since 1970, bound by legal obligations to not develop or acquire nuclear weapons, with its nuclear program subject to regular international verification under the treaty framework. By contrast, Israel has never joined the NPT, and is not bound by any of the treaty’s legal obligations.

This report included contributions from journalist Carolina Pedrazzi, and was originally published by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions.

On Palm Sunday 2026, a major incident that sparked global attention unfolded in Jerusalem: Israeli security forces blocked Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top-ranking Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity’s most sacred site, where he intended to lead traditional holy week prayers. The incident quickly drew an outpouring of international sympathy for the cardinal, but a on-the-ground reporting visit to the ancient church, located in Jerusalem’s Old City Christian Quarter, a day later revealed a sharp rift within the local Palestinian Catholic community over the patriarch’s response to the blockade.

Weeks before the incident, after Israel joined the United States in military strikes against Iran, the Old City has been largely sealed off to visitors. Israeli security forces are deployed at every entrance gate, imposing strict access controls to all religious holy sites in the area. For most of the holy month of Ramadan and the recent Eid al-Fitr holiday, Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, has remained entirely closed to Muslim worshippers.
Israeli authorities publicly defend the sweeping restrictions, citing credible safety risks stemming from Iranian missile attacks. Small fragments from intercepted Iranian missiles have indeed caused minor damage across Jerusalem in recent weeks. But Palestinian residents of the Old City are uniformly skeptical of this justification, arguing the access limits are actually a deliberate tactic to further entrench Israel’s long-standing control over the occupied East Jerusalem territory. Israel has occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, since the 1967 Six-Day War, and the International Court of Justice reaffirmed the international community’s consensus that this occupation is illegal under international law in a 2024 ruling.

Many local Palestinian Catholics say Pizzaballa, an Italian cleric widely respected and celebrated in global Catholic circles, responded to the blockade with too much deference to Israeli authorities. Boutros, a local Catholic shopkeeper who requested a pseudonym for personal safety, told reporters the cardinal should have directly confronted the blocking soldiers rather than quietly agreeing to turn back. “He should have found a way,” Boutros said. “If necessary, he should have prayed in the street.”

After being turned away, Pizzaballa instead held an alternate service at the Church of All Nations on the Mount of Olives, located just outside the Old City walls. Boutros criticized the patriarch’s willingness to enter into negotiations over access to the holy site with Israeli officials, arguing that any negotiation implicitly recognizes Israel’s contested authority over the occupied Old City. “By negotiating, you acknowledge the authority of the Israelis,” he explained.

Shortly after the Sunday incident, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he had ordered Israeli officials to grant Pizzaballa “full and immediate access” to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Israeli police confirmed they had reached a formal agreement with church leadership to allow planned Easter celebrations to proceed. In a public statement following the agreement, the Latin Patriarchate said it had maintained “continuous dialogue with the authorities, including the Israeli police”, and thanked Israeli President Isaac Herzog for his “prompt attention and valued intervention”. The statement also appeared to endorse Israel’s safety justification for the original restrictions, noting that “naturally, and in light of the current state of war, the existing restrictions on public gatherings remain in force for the time being”. This marked the first time in hundreds of years that a sitting Jerusalem Patriarch was unable to celebrate Palm Sunday mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, according to the Patriarchate’s own records.

But for local Palestinian Christians, this outcome is far from a victory. Many see the entire incident as a reflection of a long-standing pattern of excessive deference to Israeli occupation by senior Christian religious leaders across all denominations—Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian, and other groups. Critics argue church leaders have prioritized protecting the limited status and privileges Israel grants them over advocating for and serving their local congregations.
During on-the-ground interviews in the Old City’s narrow alleyways, most local residents declined to share their full names, due to surveillance and pressure from Israeli security forces. One local Palestinian woman returning home with groceries pointed to the near-empty streets, a stark contrast to the crowded, festive atmosphere that normally marks the lead-up to Easter. “There are no celebrations. At this time of year the city should be crowded. They are killing any sense of joy,” she said.

Constant, intrusive Israeli military and police presence around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself already violates the decades-old “status quo” agreement that grants full control of the site to Christian religious authorities, residents and rights groups note. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), a London-based legal advocacy group, has condemned the blockade of Pizzaballa as a “flagrant act of religious persecution”, drawing a parallel to repeated Israeli infringements on the authority of the Jerusalem Waqf, the Muslim custodian body that manages Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The ICJP also accuses Israel of blatant religious double standards. Even amid the current conflict with Iran, Israeli authorities allowed large public Jewish Purim celebrations to take place across Jerusalem earlier this month, when Iranian missile strikes were already occurring. Israeli media documented young, intoxicated celebrants dancing in costumes in the streets with loud music, but no restrictions were imposed on these events. Meanwhile, access restrictions targeting Palestinian Christian and Muslim worshippers remain fully in place.
When reporters arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the visit, its main doors remained closed, and Israeli security gestured for the press team to move away when they approached. An Israeli security flag hangs above the church entrance, a symbol for local Palestinians of illegal foreign occupation. For the city’s Palestinian Christian community, the restrictions on worshippers are not a well-intentioned safety measure as Israel claims—they are a deliberate, cruel act of colonial domination that erodes their centuries-old connection to their most sacred site.
Boutros summed up the widespread despair among local residents: “The church is older than countries and empires. When I was a boy, my father would take the day off to go to the Old City to enjoy the traditions. Now who really wants to come to the Old City to be bullied by the Israeli police?” The frustration felt by local Christians is shared broadly across the Old City’s Palestinian community, who face daily humiliating searches, harassment, and restrictions on their movement as part of Israel’s ongoing occupation.

European officials are sounding alarms that Israel’s military campaign in southern Lebanon is developing ominous parallels with its 1982 invasion, with warnings that the current offensive might ultimately prove more devastating. According to insights shared with Middle East Eye, the conflict’s protracted nature and expanding scope are generating profound concerns among diplomatic circles.

The Israeli military operation has transformed most territories south of Lebanon’s Litani River into active combat zones, implementing comprehensive expulsion orders for all residents and systematically targeting critical infrastructure including bridges and river crossings. This strategic isolation has effectively severed southern regions from the remainder of the country, creating humanitarian corridors that are increasingly impassable.

Despite unprecedented diplomatic overtures from Beirut—including offers for direct talks and measures to distance the government from Hezbollah’s activities—Israeli officials have demonstrated minimal interest in negotiated solutions. Tel Aviv has dismissed these efforts as insufficient, citing Beirut’s prolonged inability to constrain Hezbollah’s military operations since the conclusion of the previous conflict in November 2024.

The current military strategy, described by European sources as implementing a ‘Khan Younis option’ reminiscent of Gaza tactics, involves systematic infrastructure destruction, building demolitions, and population displacement. Israeli forces are advancing coordinately toward the Litani River while encountering significant resistance from Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters in strategic border territories.

Senior Israeli officials have openly discussed maintaining an indefinite security presence in Lebanon, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich proposing territorial extension to the Litani River and Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly stating intentions to occupy southern Lebanese territories post-conflict. Approximately 600,000 displaced Lebanese citizens have been barred from returning to their homes south of the Litani until Israel’s security requirements are fully met.

The humanitarian situation continues deteriorating dramatically, with over 1,200 fatalities recorded and more than 1 million residents displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs and eastern regions. The Norwegian Refugee Council reports evacuation orders affecting residents across 14% of Lebanon’s territory, while Shia populations face particular difficulties securing shelter due to fears of Israeli strikes.

European diplomatic interventions, including French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot’s recent visit to Israel, have produced minimal progress toward conflict resolution. With senior officials predicting the war could extend for months or years, concerns are mounting that prolonged hostilities might reawaken Lebanon’s sectarian divisions and ultimately eliminate potential political partners for future negotiations.

The China-Laos Railway has achieved a remarkable transportation milestone, handling over 70 million passenger journeys since its inauguration in December 2021. According to official data released by China Railway Kunming Group Co., this flagship infrastructure project has revolutionized travel between Southwest China’s Yunnan province and the Lao capital of Vientiane.

Spanning 1,035 kilometers through some of Southeast Asia’s most spectacular landscapes, the railway has established itself as a vital corridor for cross-border tourism and economic exchange. The route connects numerous renowned destinations including Kunming, Xishuangbanna, and the UNESCO World Heritage site of Luang Prabang, providing access to more than 560 scenic attractions along its path.

In response to escalating demand, railway authorities from both nations have implemented coordinated service enhancements. The Chinese section has dramatically increased capacity from an initial eight daily trains to a current peak of 86, while the Lao segment has expanded from four to eighteen daily services. This operational optimization reflects the growing popularity of rail travel between the two countries.

The international dimension of the railway expanded significantly with the introduction of direct Kunming-Vientiane passenger services in April 2023. This development has facilitated border crossings for more than 780,000 international tourists from over 120 countries, demonstrating the railway’s role as a catalyst for global tourism in the region.

The project stands as a testament to Sino-Laotian cooperation, serving both as a practical transportation solution and a symbol of regional connectivity under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Its success continues to reshape travel patterns and economic dynamics across Southeast Asia.