By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) on Sunday said, it is in communication with South Africans stranded in the Middle East and is reviewing evacuation contingencies.
Israel and Iran traded new attacks Sunday, after Tehran hit both the Dubai International Airport — the world’s busiest for international traffic — and Kuwait’s main airport during its retaliatory strikes.
Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had all announced at least partial closures of their skies on Saturday after the US and Israel attacked Iran, bringing civilian air traffic over the Middle East to an abrupt halt.
Notable airlines that cancelled services included Emirates, Etihad, Air France, British Airways, Air India, Turkish Airlines, and Lufthansa.
Head of Public Diplomacy at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Clayson Monyela, explained that evacuations cannot take place while airspace remains closed and land borders are restricted for security reasons.
“When countries are at war, in the manner that is happening with missiles and all of that, the first thing they do is to shut down the airspace… if anything is up there, you shoot it down, because you don’t know whether it’s a missile or an aeroplane.”
He said the department does not have a confirmed figure for the number of South Africans in the affected areas.
“South Africans don’t tell us when they leave; we can only guess and estimate,” Monyela noted, adding that in the United Arab Emirates alone, about 18,000 South Africans are registered with the mission.
“In some of these countries, they’ve also shut down the internet. So, communication is a challenge,” Monyela said.
Despite this, he confirmed that the department has set up WhatsApp and other communication groups to remain in contact with registered citizens.
“So far, we’ve not lost anybody. The South Africans that we know of are all accounted for in space, so we are monitoring the situation to see what develops.”
Both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, have called on Iranians to overthrow the radical clerical regime that took power after the 1979 revolution against the shah.
The US and Israeli offensive has rocked much of the Islamic world. There were protests in Pakistan, where police on Sunday clashed with protesters who breached the outer wall of the US consulate in Karachi, leaving nine people dead, and outside the Green Zone in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, where the US embassy is located.