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Thousands of cruise ship passengers remain stranded in the Gulf as a result of the war on Iran.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN-run agency, told AFP on Thursday that around 20,000 seafarers and 15,000 cruise ship passengers were trapped as the conflict has frozen travel.

"Beyond the economic impact of these alarming attacks, it is a humanitarian issue. No attack on innocent seafarers is ever justified," Arsenio Dominguez, the IMO’s secretary general, said.

"I reiterate my call for all shipping companies to exercise maximum caution when operating in the affected region," he added.

The freeze on travel is part of the growing number of industries that have been disrupted by the war in the Middle East, with tourism severely affected by the region-wide conflict.

In-bound arrivals have been projected to fall by as much as a quarter year-on-year in 2026, according to Global Forecasting.

As well as tourists, seafarers have been placed at risk. On Thursday, two Indian crew members were reported to have been killed in attacks on a tanker. Ashish Kumar and Dalip Singh were killed in strikes on a Palau-flagged oil tanker called Skylight in the Gulf of Oman.

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Israel closed all crossings into Gaza indefinitely when it attacked Iran, imposing a siege that has already pushed up food prices and threatens to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis.

After more than two years of war, and with Israeli forces in control of about 60% of the territory, almost all of Gaza’s food must be brought in.

Humanitarian groups feeding much of the population say the supplies they had on Saturday, when the war began, will only last a few more days.

“If [the borders] stay closed, World Central Kitchen will run out of food this week,” said the organisation’s founder and chief, José Andrés, in a post on social media.

“We are cooking 1m hot meals every day. We need food deliveries every single day.”

One international food security expert said there was just a week’s supply of fresh food in Gaza.

Community bakeries that supply some of the most vulnerable people have only enough flour for about 10 days of bread, and there are about two weeks’ supply of aid parcels.

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza last spring followed by extreme restrictions on food shipments. Together they caused a famine last summer.

Hundreds of people were also killed trying to reach the food distribution points of a new logistics organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which only operated in Israeli-controlled areas.

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US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.

“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.

“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.

Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.

In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.

Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.

“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”

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US political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had caught and “arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries”.

“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran?” Carlson said on his show. “Aren’t they on the same side?”

“Israel wants to hurt Iran - and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman and Kuwait,” he added.

Carlson also alleged that Israel deliberately sows chaos among America’s Arab allies.

The American journalist did not cite a source for the claim, which Middle East Eye could not independently verify.

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US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he’s “not happy” with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not joining the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, though he allowed US forces to use UK bases.

“I’m not happy with the UK,” Trump said during a White House meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “It’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

Trump also singled out Spain, whose left-wing government refused to let US planes use its bases for attacks and resisted NATO defense spending increases.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

The comments came as US and Israeli strikes hit targets across Tehran, marking the fourth day of the conflict.

Drones and missiles targeted Iranian oil facilities and US embassies in the Gulf, while Israel intensified operations in Lebanon against Tehran-backed Hezbollah after the militia entered the fight.

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The search for the dead in the apparent U.S. or Israeli missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school in Iran has officially ended.

But the questions surrounding the attack that killed at least 175 people have just begun, as international condemnation and calls for investigations – and accountability – were amplified March 2.

“All alleged violations − including indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian infrastructure, and attacks on medical facilities and schools − must be promptly, independently, and transparently investigated,” one of the world’s oldest human rights organizations, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), said in a statement.

“Where evidence of war crimes or other serious violations is found,” it added, “those responsible, regardless of rank or official capacity, must be held accountable in accordance with international law.”

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