Fly Dubai flights landed at Dubai International Airport on Monday. Several airlines in the Persian Gulf — including Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Doha in Qatar and others — have curtailed commercial flights for security reasons following the expanding US and Israeli bombing of Iran.
Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
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Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
Limited flights from the Middle East resumed on Monday, but hundreds of thousands of passengers are still stuck in the region’s major aviation hubs after attacks on Iran by the US and Israel.
Tourists and business travelers huddled in hotels and airports across the Middle East, awaiting word on when airports would reopen and flights in and out of the region.
“We’re waiting to get out. Our flights keep getting canceled,” said Christy Elmer of Portsmouth, NH, who traveled to Dubai last week for business meetings and now isn’t sure when she’ll be able to leave.
“We have flights booked every day of the week, and Sunday is canceled. Monday is canceled. Tuesday is already canceled. So, I think the Wednesday flights will stay,” Elmer said in an interview.
Emirates Airlines, one of the world’s largest carriers, announced on Monday evening that it would resume operations on a “limited number of flights”. “We are preferentially accommodating customers with earlier bookings,” the airline said in a social media post, but warned that all other flights would be suspended until further notice.
Airlines canceled more than 3,400 flights in the Middle East on Monday alone, bringing the total number of cancellations to nearly 10,000 since the war began, according to a post by flight-tracking site FlightAware24.
⚠️Cancellations now exceed 9,500 flights at seven major Middle East airports (DXB, DOH, AUH, SHJ, KWI, BAH, DWC).
February 28: 1,400+ flights
March 1: 3,400+ flights
March 2: 3,400+ flights
March 3: 1,300+ flights pic.twitter.com/yqBFOnSiSw— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) March 2, 2026
Airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha are major hubs for travel between Europe and the Americas, Africa and Asia. Airports in all three cities say they have been targeted by Iranian strikes targeting civilian and military sites in US-friendly states in the Persian Gulf region.
Dubai’s airport, one of the world’s busiest, said it had resumed operations on Monday evening “with a reduced number of flights”, days after social media posts showed passengers fleeing smoke-filled hallways following a drone strike.
Abu Dhabi’s airport resumed “partial operations” on Monday, according to a social media post. Flights on another major Abu Dhabi-based carrier, Etihad Airways, were among the first to take off, according to FlightRadar24. Flights in and out of Doha’s main airport have been “temporarily suspended”, the airport said.
It’s not clear how many international passengers are stranded in the region, but an average of 90,000 passengers a day pass through the region’s major hubs on three airlines, Emirates, Etihad and Doha-based Qatar Airways, according to aviation analytics company Sirium.
Airspace or airports across the region were closed over the weekend, according to flight tracking sites and government agencies. Many more cancellations are likely in the coming days as airstrikes and counter-attacks continue.
That has stranded travelers around the world scrambling to make alternative plans.
“I deal with uncertainty all the time,” said Christy Elmer, whose work as a consultant focuses on helping clients navigate adaptation and change. He says it helped him put his own situation into perspective.
“We’ve lost some service members through this. There are people who are living in much worse conditions right now through this conflict. We stayed in a nice hotel that took care of us,” Elmer said. “So I think keeping that perspective helps me stay calm.”
