On the sixth day of a fruitless wait, on Thursday, March 5, nerves began to fray. “Yes or no, is anyone going to answer us?” shouted a visibly agitated man, pounding his fist on the reception desk in a tower in Dubai’s upscale Marina neighborhood along the waterfront. Gathered at the entrance to the building housing the French consulate, tourists who have been stranded in the United Arab Emirates since February 28 – the day US-Israeli operations began in Iran and Iranian retaliatory strikes hit the entire Middle East region – are running out of patience.

So far, two French government planes have repatriated 400 to 500 people deemed “vulnerable.” But since then, nothing has happened. On Thursday evening, an Air France flight chartered by Paris to repatriate French nationals from the United Arab Emirates had to turn back to Egypt due to missile fire “in the area.” For some, the repeated announcements on Thursday of a “very limited” resumption of certain flights, according to Emirates, the Dubai-based airline, only intensified the feeling of abandonment for those unable to secure a precious golden ticket. Without one of these passes, authorities have discouraged visitors from testing their luck at the airport, nevertheless the world’s second largest in terms of air traffic and one of the most important international hubs.

Parisian students in their late teens, Fiona, Farah and Jade, who, like all other people interviewed here, preferred to give only their first names, swore they would not leave the lobby of the French consulate without a solution. “Here, the legal age is 21, so we are considered minors,” they explained. All three were supposed to leave Dubai after a short tourist stay, connecting via Bahrain, another Gulf country that has been thrown into turmoil, its airspace paralyzed.

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