The second of two military planes sent to rescue New Zealanders stranded by the Middle East war is returning home because it’s not needed.<\/p>\n
The Hercules were sent earlier this month amid fears the conflict between the US and Israel and Iran would shut down commercial flights out of big hubs like Dubai.<\/p>\n
But the Defence Force said there were plenty of flights available for people wanting to leave.<\/p>\n
It said one of the Hercules returned on Sunday and the other was currently on route and will arrive on Saturday.<\/p>\n
It is the second time the Defence Force has flown to the Middle East, but was not needed for any evacuation flights.<\/p>\n
Defence Minister Judith Collins said a lot of people had indicated that they wanted to leave, but in the end, either decided they could move across land borders, commercial flights or didn’t want to go.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s always about being prepared. It takes quite a long time to get the assets into the region and if we have them there, then we can always bring them back,” Collins told\u00a0Morning Report.<\/p>\n
Collins did not have specifics on how much the flight cost.<\/p>\n
“Our Defence people are ready and willing to help wherever possible to help New Zealanders… If they’re not needed, that’s fine too; if they are needed, they’ll be there.”<\/p>\n
There were currently around 3000 New Zealanders registered with Foreign Affairs as living in the region.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the government also put on buses for people wanting to get from Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain to Saudi Arabia but only a handful had taken that up.<\/p>\n
It said it continued to monitor the situation closely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The second of two military planes sent to rescue New Zealanders stranded by the Middle East war is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-337786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}