The recent attacks on Saudi Arabia have brought the human cost of this conflict into sharp and painful focus for Pakistan. A Pakistani national was among 12 killed in a missile strike on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. In August, Pakistani crew members were killed when a commercial vessel was attacked in the Red Sea.

For the millions of Pakistanis living and working in the Kingdom and across the Gulf, daily life has been reshaped by anxiety. Those who have built their livelihoods in these economies now face deep uncertainty, and attacks on airports across the region have shattered assumptions about the safety of civilian infrastructure.

The channels through which this conflict reaches Pakistani households are well established. Migration is a household strategy to secure income and insure against shocks, and remittances are how that insurance works. When conflict disrupts a migrant’s ability to send money home, the household loses its most reliable buffer against poverty. World Bank estimates suggest remittance-receiving households in Pakistan face a risk of poverty up to 13 percentage points lower than others, and remittances are credited with lifting more than 47 million Pakistanis out of poverty between 2001 and 2018. IMF research confirms that these flows are mainly spent on household consumption, functioning as informal........

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