As we neared Dubai’s Terminal 3, the air was thick with tension. Hundreds of passengers stood outside, braving the scorching midday sun, their anxiety evident.

This scene unfolded just two days after a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones started targeting the United Arab Emirates with alarming frequency.

Among the anxious crowd were expatriates eager to leave, travelers in transit who never planned to stay in Dubai longer than a few hours, and tourists whose winter getaways had been abruptly cut short.

Families with young children, their vacation plans shattered, also filled the throng, each person uncertain if they would secure a flight out that day. Many eventually did, and since then, thousands more have managed to leave.

It’s puzzling how the airport—renowned as the world’s busiest international gateway—remained operational amid such chaos. Under similar conditions, airports in Europe or the United States would likely have been shut down, adhering to stringent safety regulations. Perhaps luck played a part in keeping the operations steady amidst the turmoil.

Just how the airport – the world’s busiest international hub – managed to be open at all in the circumstances and remain so every day since the war began, is quite baffling. It would surely be inconceivable under prevailing safety laws anywhere in Europe or the United States. Maybe they’ve just been very lucky.

Earlier this week, a shaheed kamikaze drone hit a fuel tank less than a mile from the terminal. The airport was closed for six hours, causing en route planes from as far away as Australia to be turned around mid-air and all take-offs suspended.

Yet astonishingly, as we drew close to the huge blaze with teams of exhausted firefighters choking on thick black smoke, there was an Emirates jet rising through the air just beyond as if it were a routine take-off from Gatwick on a weekday morning.

After spending the last two weeks reporting from Dubai (under a pseudonym, for a reason I shall come to) the lasting impression is the same as the one I’ve always had after half a dozen trips here over the years: the place is completely unbelievable.

Footage taken from social media shows a drone strike on Dubai International Airport on March 7

An Iranian drone hit a fuel tank near Dubai Airport, sparking a massive fire on March 16

An Emirates Airbus A380 aircraft prepares for landing as a smoke plume rises from an ongoing fire near Dubai International Airport on March 16

Let’s take the message being pumped out at the government’s bidding by 50,000 or so influencers, many of them Brits – a secret propaganda army parroting ‘Dubai is Safe’ hashtags while deadly munitions fell from the sky. No matter that quite a few of those same influencers such as former Apprentice star Luisa Zissman, quietly skedaddled themselves, claiming their trip back to Britain was planned before the war.

That’s not to say that the UAE air defences haven’t done an amazing job of intercepting the missiles and drones, but let us not forget, if just one gets through – and plenty of drones have – it would be enough to take out a bus or cause a bloodbath in a residential building.

This bonkers city-state, which boasts a ski slope with artificially-made snow and drag lift inside one of its gargantuan malls, never fails to make one’s jaw drop. Space age architecture looms into the sky in sight of drab, overcrowded accommodation housing thousands of low-paid migrant workers.

Beaming influencers sporting fake tans and polar-white teeth extol the virtues of the tax-free regime while anyone who falls foul of the harsh laws that penalise a criticism of the government, the royals, police, or local culture can expect a grim fate.

Torture is common inside the hellhole jails and police stations, as previous visitors attest. So many foreigners find themselves ‘Detained in Dubai’ that an entire organisation bearing that name has been set up to assist them.

In the time we’ve been in Dubai, the government’s attitude here and in the other emirates has hardened against anyone posting images online of missiles, drones or their interception by ground defences. More than 100 people – including one British tourist – have been arrested and charged with spreading such information, facing up to a year in jail and hefty fines.

One family whose apartment was hit, were arrested for sending photos of the damage to relatives back home.

That’s why I and a colleague opted not to have our names on the stories we reported on in the Daily Mail – we did not want to be added to those growing ranks of arrested foreigners.

Passengers awaiting airline updates at Dubai airport on Saturday after the airport closed again due to drone strikes

Vicky Pattison was one of dozens of celebs desperately trying to return to the UK after the war began. She and husband Ercan Ramadan drove 11 hours to reach neighbouring Oman in hope of flying back to Britain from there 

Father-of-four Samuel Leeds, from Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, prompted an online backlash when telling of his £150,000 private flight out. He is pictured with his wife Amanda and their children on a private jet

Others media outlets didn’t manage to avoid the ire of the authorities, and one TV camera crew was arrested for filming a piece to camera from the street, while police forced photographers to delete images from the cameras and forced some to make a visit to the infamous Bur Dubai police station.

The opaque Dubai Media Office, which rarely replies to enquiries from journalists, has been working overtime in the past fortnight, assuring everyone that, basically ‘everything is awesome’. This, after all, is a somewhat Orwellian state, which boasts a ‘Minister for Happiness’ with his own department.

Even when a huge cloud of dust and smoke was thrown up by a drone strike at Dubai Airport on Saturday March 7, landing worryingly close to the terminal, the Media Office continued to insist there had been ‘no incident’ simply because, by some miracle, no-one was injured.

When there have been deaths and injuries, the Media Office has been very quick to send out the message that the victim was ‘Pakistani’, ‘Bangladeshi’, or ‘Palestinian’. The implication that their lives are cheap is clear to anyone who has spoken to the legions of low-paid migrant workers, largely from the Indian Sub-continent, who keep this place going.

Often their passports are held by their employers for the duration of their stay, and their visa is entirely dependent on their job.

In the good times, they were shipped in by the hundreds of thousands, but times aren’t quite so good now, and on a trip to the airport, I saw hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis heading home – and not exactly voluntarily.

One hotel worker from Karachi told me that he was being forced to take what little ‘paid leave’ he had now, whether he wanted to or not.

When that runs out, his fate is anyone’s guess, as he has been told that it may be ‘some time’ before he’s allowed to return to the bar job that provided so much income for his family back home.

Other migrant workers have been allowed to remain in the country, but their pay has been cut, so they are getting by on subsistence wages with nothing left over to send to their relatives – which is, after all, the main motivation propelling them to Dubai in the first place.

As you stroll down ‘The Walk’ at Jumeirah Beach Residence, a prime tourist destination groaning with upmarket beach clubs, restaurants and hotels, the truth about Dubai’s desperation really hits home.

A tourist and his father have been arrested in Dubai for posting war videos before the population was ordered to keep them off social media. Pictured: Creek Harbour hotel in Dubai following an Iranian drone strike

The Palm Jumeirah Fairmont hotel was hit by a Shahed suicide drone launched from Iran hours after US and Israeli air strikes hit Tehran

The five-star hotel following a drone missile strike on February 28 

It’s not the kind of panic that necessarily sends people scurrying for bomb shelters – at least not while the supply of interceptor missiles holds out. No, this is a different kind of gnawing, slow-burn fear born out of gazing into a very uncertain future.

You can see it in the faces of the young women and men standing forlornly outside the beach clubs while behind them sit row upon row of unopened umbrellas and empty sun loungers. The incessant beat goes on, but no-one is there to hear it.

Then there are the attractive, well-groomed salesmen and women, dressed to the nines and sitting in tiny, air-conditioned cabins, set up to lure tourists into investing in the ‘booming’ Dubai property market.

With no tourists to pester – and this is peak season – they stare into the middle distance contemplating their fate, the glittering images of the luxury apartments they’re pushing now looking as out-of-place as their stifling three-piece suits in the 34C heat.

In the early days of the crisis, some people were so keen to escape that they endured gruelling overland trips by bus, car or paid a sheikh’s ransom to a taxi driver for the pleasure of six hours to Muscat in neighbouring Oman or 12 hours to the Saudi capital of Riyadh for a connecting flight.

A lucky few even splashed out up to £150,000 on private jets from Dubai’s VIP terminal, or more often from neighbouring countries, escaping with even their pet dogs in some cases.

The Dubai exodus was in full swing when we flew into Muscat on March 1 and made the boss of a local car rental firm turn ashen at our proposal to take one of his vehicles on a one-way drop off into the war zone. He certainly made us pay for the privilege.

Approaching the remote border post of Hatta on the frontier with UAE, I recalled to my colleague the chaotic scenes I had witnessed in north-east Saudi 35 years ago, shortly before the First Gulf War as thousands of Kuwaitis and foreigners fled Saddam Hussein’s invading troops.

I expected to see cars laden with huge parcels of luggage and children almost spilling out of the back windows, the convoy of fear forming a dusty line as far as the eye could see.

But there was nothing of the sort when we drew up to the border post in mid-afternoon. Not a single car was coming in the other direction. Clearly, whatever the level of ‘panic’ in Dubai, it was largely restricted to those waiting for a seat on an aircraft and wasn’t enough to make them endure a long road trip through the desert.

Mugshots of 25 people arrested for sharing ‘war footage’ in the UAE, with the first group, pictured, said to have ‘published and circulated authentic video clips’ of missile interceptions

The second group was arrested for publishing footage of attacks that were either AI-generated or occurred outside the UAE

And a third group of defendants is made up of people who published material ‘glorifying a hostile state’

One delayed tourist even suggested to me that he’d be more at risk on the open road to the border than holed up in a five-star hotel on the famous Palm Jumeirah resort. It smacked less of panic and more of peevishness.

The attitude of those hardened expats who chose to tough it out in Dubai can be harder to fathom and likely boils down to a lack of other options. Thousands have already headed back to Britain – whether permanently, or merely until this war is over, remains to be seen.

Many Western financial institutions have evacuated their staffs not just from the UAE but from other Gulf states, especially after the Iranian Republican Guard announced that banks and tech companies with US connections would be targeted.

With no sign of regime change in Tehran, despite the optimistic predictions of President Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the crisis has delivered a grim reminder of just how vulnerable the UAE and its neighbours are to Iran.

It’s also been a lesson in geography; highlighting the Ayatollahs’ vice-like grip on the passage of the world’s oil tankers at the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz.

‘This place has been my home for 20 years,’ one British ex-pat told me this week over a drink in one of Dubai’s many Irish pubs.

‘Of course we’re worried, but we have to believe that the UAE will bounce back from this.

‘I don’t want to go back and live in Britain with its wet weather and high taxes after all this time here, living tax free.

‘Maybe Dubai just needs a bit of readjustment, and the ridiculous rents and property prices will fall a bit – hopefully not plummet.’

The longer this crisis flares, the more his blind optimism will seem as outlandish as the city’s skyscape itself.