As missiles rain down on the Middle East, concerns about a humanitarian emergency are beginning to mount.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced by fighting in Iran and Lebanon, setting in motion what could become yet another major refugee crisis in the region. The European Union’s asylum agency warned that a displacement of just 10% of Iran’s 91 million people “would rival the largest refugee flows of recent decades.”
Those earlier crises – namely those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria – sent millions of people seeking shelter in neighboring countries in the Middle East and in Europe.
But the world is a very different place than in 2015, when the last exodus to Europe reached its peak. Governments that initially embraced refugees, including Germany and Sweden, have sharply reversed course in the decade since, adopting far more restrictive policies amid rising anti-immigration sentiment at home.
“We cannot have what we had 10 years ago. We cannot have another refugee crisis,” Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssell said after a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels last week. Instead of opening their doors, he said, European countries are preparing to provide humanitarian assistance in the Middle East – echoing a new European Union pledge to send food, medical kits, and other aid to Lebanon.
The following day, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on the US and Israel to create the conditions for Iran “to be stabilized as quickly as possible,” adding that Germany hopes to avoid a new wave of refugees arriving at their doorstep.
The United States is taking a similar, closed-door approach. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference last week that there were no plans to admit refugees and suggested a number of countries in the Middle East “would be capable” of sheltering displaced people “if need be.”
Shelter lost in both Iran and Lebanon. Whether those countries can absorb an influx of migrants is far from certain. One major complication is the fact that Iran and Lebanon – now the targets of bombardments, including allegedly with an incendiary substance called white phosphorus – were already hosting a large number of refugees themselves, many of whom will now seek safety elsewhere.
According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), roughly 2.5 million displaced persons, including 760,000 Afghan refugees, currently reside in Iran. Lebanon, meanwhile, was already hosting many Syrian refugees. Tens of thousands have reportedly fled back across the border after Israel ordered parts of southern Lebanon and the capital, Beirut, to evacuate last week. In total, nearly 700,000 people have been made homeless in Lebanon, while 100,000 were displaced inside Iran during the first two days of the conflict – numbers that are growing by the hour.
Could Turkey and Iraq provide refuge? For many Iranians fleeing the violence, the most likely destinations are the neighboring states of Turkey and Iraq. Iranians are normally allowed to enter Turkey for tourism without a visa for up to 90 days – hundreds of Iranians reportedly crossed the border as the fighting intensified last week. However, Turkey’s trade minister later announced that daily passenger traffic at all three border crossings had been mutually suspended.
Even as it restricts travel, Ankara appears to be preparing for the possibility of mass arrivals. Turkish authorities announced plans over the weekend to establish buffer zones and a tent city along the border capable of housing 90,000 people.
But Turkey’s capacity is already stretched. The country already hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world: approximately 2.9 million Syrians lived there under temporary protection as of 2024, along with nearly 200,000 other refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere.
Iraq has its own constraints. According to the UNHCR, the country holds more than 340,000 refugees and asylum seekers, roughly a third of whom live in the Kurdistan region near the Iranian border.
Show me the money. Even if the EU and the US hope to keep refugees in the Middle East, that strategy will require humanitarian funding, which is currently in short supply. In late 2025, the US, the world’s largest humanitarian donor, cut its contribution to refugee organizations, including the UNHCR, from $14 billion to $3.7 billion.
While the EU remains a major funding partner, some countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany, have reduced their contributions due to domestic budget pressures. The percentage of unearmarked funding to the UNHCR has dropped to 17%, almost half of what it was in 2023, limiting the organization’s capacity to respond to new crises with emergency medical aid, food, and shelter. Should Iran’s war cause a humanitarian disaster, it’s not clear who will be able – or willing – to pick up the tab.
