War in Gaza is threatening the fragile and tourism-dependent economies of Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon and triggering concerns that the impact will spread across the Middle East.
In Jordan, where tourism accounts for 10 per cent of gross domestic product, one tour operator said the war had triggered a string of cancellations: “Just like that, months and months of bookings have disappeared,” he said.
In Egypt, where the government has already turned to the IMF to relieve its economic crisis, many tourism bookings in Sinai, which borders Gaza, have been cancelled.
“We’re already seeing reports of cancelled bookings in neighbouring countries like Egypt,” said Farouk Soussa, Goldman Sachs’s regional economist. “We think it could cost Egypt billions in lost tourism revenues this fiscal year alone . . . Egypt doesn’t have the foreign exchange buffers to absorb that sort of hit.”
Noura al-Kaabi, a United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs, on Friday said the Gulf state was working “relentlessly” for a full ceasefire and warned that the regional temperature was approaching a “boiling point”.
“The risk of regional spillover and further escalation is real,” she told a conference in Abu Dhabi.
