The US-Israeli war with Iran, which has paralyzed air travel across the Middle East, has also frozen deliveries of vital medical supplies from the world’s largest humanitarian supply hub in Dubai to conflict-wracked countries from Afghanistan to Lebanon, said the World Health Organization on Thursday. 

“Operations at WHO’s logistics hub for global health emergencies in Dubai, are currently on hold due to insecurity,” said WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a WHO press briefing in Geneva.

The airspace closures as well as restrictions on cargo traffic through the Straits of Hormuz have put the hub’s operations “temporarily on hold,” echoed Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director of the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office  (EMRO), at the briefing. 

She said that the disruption is preventing access to some $18 million in humanitarian health supplies, while another $8 million in shipments has been stranded and unable to reach the hub in Dubai. 

“More than 50 emergency supply requests from 25 countries are currently affected. And $6 million in medicines for Gaza as well as $1.6 million in polio laboratory supplies are also held up,” Balkhy said. WHO’s emergency operations across the region currently face a 70% funding gap, she added. “Without urgent financial support, essential services will cease and preventable suffering will deepen.” 

One-half of world’s humanitarian needs are in Eastern Mediterranean Region

The airspace and sea lane closures have had broad repercussions insofar as one-half of global humanitarian needs are concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean region – which extends from Pakistan all the way to Tunisia. 

The Dubai hub, alongside one of the world’s busiest airports, also serves as a logistics junction for WHO-supported medical supplies traveling to Africa, South-East Asia and beyond. 

“Last year, WHO’s global health emergencies logistics hub in Dubai fulfilled more than 500 emergency orders for 75 countries across all six WHO regions. However, humanitarian health supply chains are now being jeopardized,” said Balkhy.  

Deepening humanitarian crisis

The crisis comes just as WHO and other humanitarian partners are attempting to pre-position trauma supplies and essential medicines in vulnerable regions, like southern Lebanon, in preparation for potential mass casualties -as well as population displacement. 

Israel on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of some 300,000 people from southern Lebanon and on Thursday evening called for the evacuation of all of Beirut’s southern suburbs – moves that will almost certainly lead to an even wider humanitarian crisis in the region.

The Israeli  moves on Lebanon came after Iran’s ally, the Shi’ite Hizbullah militia, entered the war earlier this week pounding northern and central Israel with repeated volleys of rocket fire.

The war began last Saturday morning, when Israel and the US launched a surprise attack on Iranian military and missile sites – after negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and missile arsenal faltered. Iran then  sent missiles flying across the region, hitting not only Israel but Dubai’s airport, as well as military and civilian sites across the Gulf and as far away as Jordan. That has paralyzed air traffic, stranding hundreds of thousands of tourists and travelers in a widening arc of conflict.    

There are also concerns over a potential nuclear event as Israel and the United States target Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran threatens retaliation against Israel’s nuclear facility in the Negev Desert region of Dimona, WHO’s Director General warned.  

“The threat of nuclear facilities being impacted is also concerning,” said Tedros. “Any compromise to nuclear safety could have serious public health consequences.” 

Efforts to carve out alternative supply routes

As the arc of the war extends across most of the region’s air space,  WHO is exploring alternative overland supply routes as an alternative to air transport together with UNICEF and the World Food Programme, said Annette Heinzelmann – EMRO emergency director 

“We are assessing the possibility of working through our other UN logistic hubs, notably in Nairobi and in Brindisi, which are close to the region… we are also working with our logistics hub in Dakar to look into alternative shipment routes,” Heinzelmann said 

“And there is the potential of local supply sources, as well as shipments through land routes,”  she said, noting that the opportunities and barriers vary widely country by country – citing Afghanistan as an example where alternative routes of access are “highly complex.”. 

Impacts on Gaza 

For Gaza, already devastated by two-years of war with Israel, the fresh conflict with Iran and Lebanon is a huge setback in an “extremely fragile situation,” she added. 

For the first few days of the war, Israel also closed key humanitarian aid corridors.  Those have since been partially reopened, “but there is really not enough humanitarian aid going in.  

“And we still do not have enough patients [able to] leave Gaza to seek medical care outside. 

Tedros described the progress in Gaza since the October cease-fire as “marginal,” saying “we need 600 trucks to cross into Gaza every single day. But currently it’s not more than 100 between 100 or 150 – and some of those tracks are actually commercial, and that doesn’t really help with humanitarian services.”

He also renewed an appeal to Israel to allow Gaza patients who can’t be treated properly in the enclave to access more specialized medical care in East Jerusalem. This, in light of the dearth of countries willing to take in the more than 10,000 Palestinians awaiting medical treatment abroad. 

“I’d like to use this opportunity to ask Israel to allow us to take patients to East Jerusalem and West Bank,” Tedros said.. 

Casualties and attacks on health facilities 

Since the war began in an early morning surprise attack by Israel and the United States on Saturday, 28 February, some 1000 people have been reportedly killed in Iran, according to the Islamic regime; 50 in Lebanon, 13 people in Israel and eleven in other countries, WHO said.

In addition, WHO has verified 13 attacks on health care in Iran and one in Lebanon, according to Balkhy, citing data culled from WHO’s  dashboard on attacks on healthcare facilities or health workers. 

The WHO dashboard, however, contains only data provided by the Islamic Regime. It has no records of the many reported regime attacks on health workers and hospitals during the month of January unrest. In that period, there were multiple, credible reports of heavily armed forces bursting into hospital emergency wards to obstruct care, arrest or kill injured patients as well as health care workers. 

Over the course of that month, the Iranian regime’s systematic killing of protestors led to an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 deaths – a death toll that the regime went to great extremes to conceal.

During the current war, members of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)  and its affiliated Basij paramilitary volunteers, are reportedly being embedded in schools, mosques and hospitals, making them targets of attack, critics  say. 

Speaking at the press briefing, Heinzelmann said that she had no information about the concealment of armed forces in health facilities. 

Reached by Health Policy Watch, a WHO spokesperson did not explain why the January attacks on health facilities by regime forces were not included in the WHO dashboard of attacks on health care. However, the spokeperson noted that the Director General had posted a remark on X about some of the reported incidents.     

I am deeply concerned by multiple reports of health personnel and medical facilities in Iran being impacted by the recent insecurity, and prevented from delivering their essential services to people requiring care.

In recent days, there have been reports of health workers…

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 29, 2026

Image Credits: Dubai Humanitarian , Palestinian Water Authority .