For the first time ever, Israel deployed its signature missile defense system to foreign soil. When Iranian ballistic missiles and drones began raining down on the United Arab Emirates in the opening weeks of the war with Iran, Abu Dhabi turned to an unlikely but increasingly trusted partner for help: Israel.
In an extraordinary and previously undisclosed deployment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to send an Iron Dome battery, complete with interceptors and several dozen Israeli troops to operate it, to the UAE following a direct phone call with Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. It was the first time Israel had ever sent the system to another country, and the UAE became the first nation outside of the United States and Israel in which Iron Dome had ever been fired in anger.
The system went on to intercept dozens of incoming Iranian missiles.
The scale of the Iranian assault on the UAE was staggering. According to the Emirati Ministry of Defense, Tehran fired approximately 550 ballistic and cruise missiles and more than 2,200 drones at the country since hostilities began on February 28, more than any other nation in the region, even more than Iran fired at Israel. While the vast majority were intercepted, some struck military and civilian targets, including the Dubai International Financial Centre and Emirati airfields, creating urgent pressure on Abu Dhabi to seek additional defensive capacity from its allies.
Israel’s response was swift and went beyond missile defense. The Israeli Air Force simultaneously conducted numerous strikes against short-range missile launch sites in southern Iran, targeting threats before they could be fired at the UAE and other Gulf states. In effect, Israel was playing both an offensive and defensive role in protecting a foreign Arab partner, while simultaneously absorbing Iranian strikes on its own soil.
The operational cooperation laid bare a transformation in the relationship that the Abraham Accords first made possible in September 2020, but which the pressures of war appear to have accelerated dramatically.
“We are not going to forget it,” a senior Emirati official told Axios, referring to the assistance provided by both Israel and the United States. A second Emirati official was equally candid about what the conflict had revealed: “It was a real eye-opening moment. To see who our real friends are.”
Those real friends, Emirati officials made clear, were not primarily from the Arab world. Tareq al-Otaiba, a former official at the UAE’s National Security Council and one of the most prominent Emirati voices on the war’s diplomatic fallout, wrote pointedly in an analysis for the Arab Gulf States Institute that several states had stepped up “to provide real assistance to the UAE” when it mattered most. Chief among them, he argued, were Washington and Jerusalem. “Primarily, the United States and Israel have proved to be true allies by offering support through extensive military aid, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic backing,” al-Otaiba wrote.
Beyond Israel and the US, France, the UK, Italy, Australia, Greece, South Korea, and Ukraine also provided various forms of military and technical assistance. South Korea accelerated the delivery of its Cheongong air defense systems and drew from its own stockpiles. Ukraine, drawing on hard-won experience countering Russian and Iranian drones, offered inexpensive interception systems and technical experts. Greece provided munitions from its sovereign reserves.
The contrast with the broader Arab response was, by al-Otaiba’s account, stark and painful. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had once promised that armed help would arrive in the time it took to cross the distance from Cairo. Yet when Iranian missiles struck Emirati soil, Cairo offered only verbal condemnation and a proposal for an “unrealistic joint Arab force.” Oman, itself under attack, congratulated Iran’s new supreme leader on his appointment. Parts of Arab social media openly celebrated images of Emirati cities under fire.
Al-Otaiba reserved particular criticism for the Arab League, whose response he described as tepid. “This is the same organization that imposed a total boycott on Israel and an arms embargo on Syria,” he noted. Yet it took six days to issue even a strongly worded declaration against Iran. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation fared little better.
The silence, al-Otaiba argued, carried serious long-term consequences. “The UAE has long financed Arab multilateral organizations, provided immense humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and supported Egypt’s central bank with tens of billions of dollars,” he wrote. But this was all with little reciprocity when Abu Dhabi needed it most. He warned that unless Arab states fundamentally changed their posture, they risked the UAE withdrawing not only from Arab multilateral institutions but potentially from OPEC as well, where Abu Dhabi has long felt its production capacity was underrepresented.
Israeli troops operating on Gulf Arab soilm and actively defending it, would have been unthinkable before the Abraham Accords. Even after normalization, such a step carried real political risk for both governments. Emirati officials, however, signaled that the calculus had fundamentally shifted. One official noted that anyone seen as helping protect the UAE against Iranian aggression would now be viewed in an unambiguously positive light by the Emirati public.
For Netanyahu, the decision to share one of Israel’s most vital defense assets at a moment when Israel itself was absorbing Iranian fire represented both a strategic bet on the partnership and a recognition that Gulf stability was inseparable from Israeli security.
Al-Otaiba drew a sharp bottom line on what the war had exposed and what it portended. “The war has shown which were true friends and which proved to be bellwether partners,” he wrote. “The UAE’s ties with the United States, Europe, Israel, and South Korea have strengthened during this crisis.”
His closing warning to the Arab world was unambiguous: “The UAE will undoubtedly remember the positions of states. The question is not whether Abu Dhabi will remember; it is what the Arab world will look like when the UAE decides to move on.”
The Iron Dome batteries may have returned home. But the alliance they helped forge in the skies above the Gulf may prove far more enduring than anyone anticipated when two nations signed a peace treaty on the White House lawn just five years ago.
