The 2026 Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca began Monday, with nearly 2 million pilgrims gathered for the three-day rite—more than 1.5 million of them coming from outside Saudi Arabia. The pilgrimage proceeds during a tenuous ceasefire in the US-Israeli war on Iran, which since its February 28 opening has seen Iranian missile strikes against Saudi and Gulf targets, surging fuel and travel costs, and major regional air-traffic disruption.
The Hajj is proceeding. Approximately 30,000 Iranians are participating, about 34% of Tehran’s 87,550 official quota; the first contingent arrived in Medina on April 25, the first Iranian citizens on Saudi soil since the war began. This continuity is a direct legacy of the 2023 Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement facilitated by China, which restored relations between the two states after seven years of severance and produced the practical pilgrim arrangements—quotas, consular services, direct flights from Iranian cities—that allow Iranian participation in the 2026 Hajj to function at all.
That a state at war with the U.S. and Israel can simultaneously send 30,000 of its citizens to Mecca on Saudi-arranged flights is evidence of the kind of layered diplomatic and developmental architecture the Schiller Institute’s Extended Oasis Plan envisions for the broader region—religious, commercial, and infrastructural ties strong enough to outlast the political weather.