‘I’m stuck in Dubai and can’t fly home – I’m still shaking over what I saw’ | World | News
An Australian holidaymaker stuck in Dubai, following the Iranian missile assault which has closed the city’s airport, has revealed he was merely 200 metres from the five-star Fairmont The Palm hotel when it was struck by a huge explosion.
Scott Graham told 9 News: “I was across the road at the Palm Tower, I had an 8pm slot booked in the infinity pool at the top of the tower, but I had a half-hour wait so I thought I’d just grab something to eat from the ground floor… I was in the restaurant and we heard this almighty boom.”
Women and children screamed, Scott said, as the colossal blast shook the structure to its core. Scott described how his restaurant table became covered in dust as the shockwave reverberated through the city.
“I went outside,” he said, “I couldn’t believe what I could see just across the road from me. The fear in people’s faces and the panic across the whole area was just crazy.”
Scott added that nobody knew where to seek refuge or what action to take in the immediate wake of the missile attack, with personnel from neighbouring hotels beginning to offer sanctuary as additional missiles could be observed shooting across the sky.
“There were literally bombs going off above our heads, everywhere,” Scott said. He could also detect anti-missile defences being fired throughout the night: “Once I finally made my way back to my hotel last night, it was very hard to sleep,” he said, as emergency warnings kept sounding.
The UAE operates an emergency alert system capable of reaching every mobile phone within the country. The piercing alarm was accompanied by messages in both Arabic and English.
The alert, issued by the UAE’s Ministry of the Interior, urged visitors and residents to seek immediate shelter well away from doors and windows and wait for further information from the authorities.
Scott described the system as “second to none,” and was full of admiration for the manner in which the UAE government has been managing the crisis.
“Today,” he said, “there’s hardly anybody on the street, everything is shut down. All the shops are closed, we’ve been asked to stay indoors”. Some guests were even sleeping on the hotel floor, he noted, rather than risk making their way across the city.
“People have nowhere to go”, he said, adding: “The airport is shut, all the flights have been stopped – it’s a waiting game now to find out what’s going on. My travel agency has been really good, they’ve been ringing me continually and checking in on me.”
More than 3,400 flights were cancelled across the seven principal airports in the Middle East, according to air traffic monitoring site Flightradar24.
Scott confessed to feeling frightened, saying: “I’m still shaking, it’s been pretty scary – I’ve never been in a position like this before.”
The Iranian strikes emerged in response to a substantial offensive from US and Israeli forces early on Saturday. The assault, which the Pentagon has designated Operation Epic Fury, occurred two days after US-Iranian discussions on Tehran’s nuclear programme concluded without agreement.
US President Donald Trump stated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed in the attacks, a claim subsequently verified by Iranian media. A US missile is also understood to have struck a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, killing 148 people and wounding 95 others, according to Iran state media.
Iran regards all US and Israeli bases, installations, and assets in the region as “legitimate military objectives,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi cautioned the UN Security Council.
“Iran will continue to exercise its right of self-defence decisively and without hesitation until the aggression ceases fully and unequivocally,” he added.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes to what its foreign minister described as an “unprovoked, illegal” attack have been directed at US interests throughout the region, including Israel, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain as well as the UAE.
The UAE’s official Media Office has issued a statement confirming that an “incident occurred in a building in the Palm Jumeirah area” and four people had sustained injuries.
