UAE Reports 2,800 Iranian Attacks in 40 Days, 90% Targeting Civilians

Over the past forty days, the United Arab Emirates has absorbed more than 2,800 missile and drone strikes. On Sunday morning, April 19th, Reem Al Hashimy, the UAE's minister of state for international cooperation, sat down with ABC's This Week to lay out the scale of what her country has endured since the US-Iran war ignited in late February. The number alone was staggering. But what made it worse, she said, was the deliberate targeting: more than 90 percent of those attacks were aimed not at military installations but at civilian infrastructure—homes, office buildings, ports, airports, the sinews of ordinary life.

Al Hashimy did not soften her language. She framed the Iranian campaign as an assault on the UAE's "model of prosperity and tolerance," and she drew a sharp line between the two nations' choices. The Emirates, she explained, had channeled its oil wealth into building an economic engine and a responsible global presence. Iran, by contrast, had poured its resources into nuclear programs, missiles, drones, and proxy forces. "They wanted to break that model," she told host Jonathan Karl, "but they underestimated our resolve."

The UAE's anger was earned. The Gulf state had initially resisted the war when the US and Israel launched their joint offensive in late February. But as the barrage continued—2,800 strikes in forty days—the country's posture hardened. What had begun as reluctance became something closer to defiance.

When asked whether Iran had fundamentally changed under its new leadership, Al Hashimy offered a measured but skeptical response. Yes, different personalities now held power. But the character of the Revolutionary Guard, the institution that had orchestrated the campaign against the UAE and its neighbors, remained to be seen. "It doesn't seem very hopeful, though," she said. Even as she spoke, the Trump administration was preparing to resume peace talks with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Monday—a second round after earlier negotiations had stalled.

The conversation also touched on the inflammatory rhetoric coming from Washington itself. Trump had previously threatened to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure and obliterate "a whole civilization" if Iran refused to open the Strait of Hormuz, language that had drawn sharp rebukes from Democrats and human rights organizations. US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz, appearing on the same Sunday morning program, reiterated that "all options are on the table."

When pressed on whether the UAE worried about those threats, Al Hashimy walked a careful line. The Emirates supported pressure on Iran, she said, but not attacks on ordinary Iranian people. "That's very important to mention," she emphasized. At the same time, she placed the blame squarely on the Revolutionary Guard, which had adopted a military posture not only against the US and Israel but against the entire neighborhood—the Gulf states themselves. The distinction mattered: the UAE wanted to see Iran constrained, but not through the destruction of its civilian population. It was a position that reflected both the country's own experience of civilian targeting and its awareness that any broader conflict would ripple across a region already fractured by war.