On the ground in the Philippines as the Middle East erupts
The streets of Dubai on Sunday were almost empty. On a normal Sunday, Filipinos in the UAE would be at malls, at parks, doing the weekly grocery run. Instead, most Filipinos in the emirates stayed home, glued to their phones and laptops for the latest news and to give word to their loved ones back in the Philippines. Some were still trembling from seeing a drone interception, or hearing the thunderous clap of a missile.
One Filipino worker in the UAE, a member of a biking community, recounted in a GMA News interview that he had advised his group chat to prepare their important documents — passport, certificates, personal belongings — just in case. He remembered doing the same thing during the Gulf War in 1990-91, when he was working in Saudi Arabia. He said his company advised all employees they can work from home from Monday to Wednesday.
For millions of Filipino households that depend on a monthly transfer from a relative in the Gulf, working from home is the manageable version of the scenario. The version nobody wants to name out loud is the one where the employer suspends operations entirely, the airport closes, and the remittance stops.
Constant close coordination
DMW Secretary Hans Cacdac said on Sunday they are in constant close coordination with Philippine embassies in the Middle East to ensure the situation of Filipinos there. “In kabuuang ulat, walang Pilipino na nasaktan or malubhang apektado nitong mga pag-atake,” he said — in the overall report, no Filipino has been harmed or seriously affected by the attacks.
That statement covers the first 36 hours. It does not cover the weeks ahead, and the DMW has not said so.
DMW records show that as of December 2025, the Middle East has the highest number of land-based OFWs, with a total of 1.113 million. Women make up the majority of OFWs, accounting for 55.6 to 57.2 percent of all workers, with around 1.25 million women working abroad in 2024. The majority of those women in the Gulf are in domestic work, caregiving, and service sector employment — categories whose workers live inside their employer’s household, not in their own apartments. In an emergency, they do not shelter in place on their own terms. They shelter in place on their employer’s.
The DFA advisory issued to Filipinos in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Jordan says: reduce travel, stay indoors, follow host government instructions. On paper, that is the correct advisory. What it does not address is the domestic worker in Sharjah whose employer has evacuated to a hotel and left her in the house, or the caregiver in Abu Dhabi whose employer’s family has flown home to Europe. Those are not edge cases. They are the structural condition of that category of employment, and the advisory was not written for it.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian has underscored the need to maintain reliable communication channels with overseas Filipino workers, including emergency hotlines, check-in systems, and temporary connectivity assistance — particularly for those in sectors with limited mobility such as domestic work, construction, and caregiving. Whether the DMW has the systems to do that at scale has not been publicly confirmed.
Jebel Ali in Dubai
Iranian attacks on US assets in the region continued for a second day on Sunday, with more blasts rocking Dubai, Doha, and Manama. The port of Jebel Ali in Dubai was struck by Iranian missiles on March 1. Dubai’s airport briefly suspended operations. Jebel Ali is the largest port in the Middle East and the regional hub through which a significant share of Gulf-bound goods, including remittance transfer infrastructure, flows.
When the airport closes, even temporarily, the informal systems through which many OFWs send money home — the padala bags that go with passengers — stop with it. Formal remittance channels through banks and money transfer operators are not affected by a single day’s airport closure. But for the household in Magalang, Pampanga or in Tulunan, Cotabato that has budgeted the month around a transfer due this week, “not affected” and “received on time” are not the same thing.
The BSP does not publish weekly remittance data. The first indication of disruption will appear in the January-to-April 2026 monthly data, published months from now. The household waiting this week will not appear in that data. It will be a private decision whether to buy the rice now or wait.
Bracing for oil price hikes
Before the strikes began on February 28, diesel in Manila was sitting at approximately ₱56.50 to ₱56.74 per liter. That figure was already the product of six consecutive weeks of price increases. Since the beginning of 2026, gasoline prices have gone up by ₱4.80 per liter and diesel by ₱8.20 per liter. Kerosene, the fuel used by fishing households and by the poorest urban families for cooking, had risen ₱6.20 per liter since January 1.
Those increases happened before Operation Epic Fury. They happened because geopolitical tension in the Middle East had been building since late 2025, and because the Oil Deregulation Law of 1998 requires oil companies to pass global price movements through to consumers immediately, without any stabilization buffer between the international market and the Filipino pump.
For the first week of March, initial indications already point to a potential price hike of ₱1.40 to ₱1.60 per liter for gasoline and ₱0.80 to ₱1 per liter for diesel, calculated before the full market impact of the Strait of Hormuz situation had settled into pricing. That adjustment was set before Brent crude crossed $80 on Sunday. The March 3 pump price adjustment will be based on price settlements that include the war’s first weekend.
A jeepney operator running a route in Cavite or Bulacan on a ₱14 minimum fare structure does the arithmetic on diesel the way a sari-sari store owner does the arithmetic on wholesale prices: every peso per liter matters because the margin between covering fuel costs and not covering them is already thin. At ₱56.50 diesel, some operators in provincial routes were already running at or near break-even on fuel alone. The ₱8.20 per liter cumulative increase since January 1 has already moved that equation; the March 3 hike has not yet been posted.
Fishing households are in a structurally worse position because they use kerosene not just for fuel but for light and cooking. The ₱6.20 per liter cumulative kerosene increase since January has no analogue in the jeepney sector’s pass-through problem, because fishermen cannot raise fares. They sell at the dockside price, which is set by buyers.
OWWA is monitoring
The OWWA emergency assistance framework provides cash aid of ₱5,000 to ₱100,000 per distressed OFW, plus repatriation subsidies. In the June 2025 Israel-Iran war, the government repatriated 38 workers in two batches. That number — 38 out of an estimated 30,000 OFWs in Israel alone — reflected a specific condition: most OFWs did not want to come home, because coming home meant losing the contract, losing the income, and returning to a domestic labor market that does not have an equivalent wage to offer.
That calculus has not changed. President Marcos has said evacuation decisions are left to individual families rather than mandated. In practice, that means the government’s repatriation infrastructure will be activated for the workers who ask for it, not for the 1.113 million workers in aggregate. The OWWA’s financial framework was designed for individual distress cases. A region-wide war puts almost 3 million Filipinos who work in the Middle East in harm’s way. Repatriating even a fraction of that number at the ₱5,000 to ₱100,000 per-case ceiling would exceed OWWA’s available fund balance several times over, based on OWWA’s published annual financial statements.
Whether the government has revised its repatriation financial framework since June 2025 to account for a larger-scale scenario has not been announced. The DMW’s public posture on March 1 is monitoring and coordination. It is not mass repatriation preparation which is not necessarily wrong, given that the situation has not yet required it. The question is whether the preparation exists for the scenario where it does.
Group chat as lifesaver
For most OFW families in the Philippines, the first information about conditions in Dubai or Riyadh does not come from the DFA advisory or the DMW bulletin. It comes from the family group chat.
The Filipino in the UAE biking community group chat knew about the drone interceptions before the embassy advisory had been updated. The family in General Santos City waiting for a call from their daughter in Qatar found out about the Doha blasts from a Facebook post in a Pinoy-in-Qatar group before the Philippine government issued a public statement. This is not a criticism of government response speed because the situation is moving faster than any bureaucratic communication system is designed to handle. It is a description of how information actually flows in OFW households, and why the official advisory architecture, designed for a unidirectional government-to-OFW communication model, consistently lags behind the actual experience of the people it is trying to reach.
The OFW family in Pampanga monitoring their daughter’s location on Find My Friends, waiting for the check-in message that usually comes at 8 PM, is navigating a real-time emergency with tools the government did not design and cannot control. That family is the unit of analysis that matters most in this crisis. Not the remittance aggregate. Not the barrel price. The family in Magalang waiting for the message to arrive.
It arrived on Sunday. For most families, it said: nandito pa ko, okay naman, mag-pray kayo.
I’m still here. I’m okay. Pray for me.
Sources for this report: GMA News dispatch from Dubai (March 1, 2026); Philippine News Agency fuel price reports (February 16, March 1, 2026); Philstar pump price report (February 28, 2026); TopGear.com.ph fuel price update (February 23, 2026); Sun Star Manila on DMW Secretary Cacdac statement (March 1, 2026); Philippine Tribune on DFA alert level advisory (March 1, 2026); Manila Times editorial (March 2, 2026); Inquirer/Gabriela statement on OFW safety (March 1, 2026); Al Jazeera Middle East conflict live updates (March 1, 2026); GlobalPetrolPrices.com Philippines diesel data (February 9, 2026). philreport.com does not accept advertising from oil companies or government agencies covered in this report.