The U.S.-Israeli army marketing campaign towards Iran took a deadly activate March 18, 2026, with tit-for-tat moves on crucial power infrastructure that quantity to probably the most severe regional escalation for the reason that war started.
First, an Israeli drone strike centered amenities at Iran’s Asaluyeh advanced, destructive 4 vegetation that deal with fuel from the offshore South Pars box, which straddles the maritime boundary between Iran and Qatar.
Tehran vowed to retaliate through hitting 5 key power objectives in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Hours later, Iranian missiles brought about “extensive damage” to Ras Laffan, the center of Qatar’s power sector. Qatar’s state-owned petroleum corporate mentioned further assaults on March 19 had centered liquefied herbal fuel amenities.
Separate suspected Iranian aerial assaults additionally brought about injury to grease refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and resulted in the closure of fuel amenities within the United Arab Emirates.
A lot consideration has been centered at the apparently unanticipated penalties of the U.S.-Israeli moves on Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz to global delivery. However as a pupil of the Gulf, I consider that the concentrated on of power amenities is as regards to a worst-case end result for regional states. Export revenues from oil and, in Qatar’s case, herbal fuel have reworked the Gulf states into regional powers with world achieve over the last 3 a long time, and that’s now in peril.
Herbal fuel refineries on the South Pars fuel box at the northern coast of the Persian Gulf, in Asaluyeh, Iran.
AP Picture / Vahid Salemi, Document
Power turns into a battlefield
The offshore fuel box that lies on all sides of the maritime boundary between Qatar and Iran is the arena’s biggest reserve of so-called nonassociated fuel. Which means that the fuel isn’t attached to the manufacturing of crude oil and is unaffected through selections to boost or decrease output in step with, for instance, OPEC quotas.
The sector, referred to as the North Box at the Qatari aspect and South Pars at the Iranian aspect, was once found out in 1971. Building of its huge assets started in earnest within the Eighties. In large part on account of the sphere, Iran and Qatar have the second- and third-largest confirmed fuel reserves on the earth, respectively.
Whilst Israel attacked fuel amenities in southern Iran on the second one day of the 12-day warfare in June 2025, oil and fuel infrastructure was once in large part spared all over that previous war. The outlet two weeks of the present combating, then again, have noticed a vital loosening of the restraints on concentrated on crucial infrastructure.
On March 8, Israel struck oil garage amenities in Tehran, beginning massive fires and blanketing the capital in plumes of smoke and poisonous, so-called black rain. For his or her phase, Iranian officers signaled that power amenities had been at the desk as swarms of its drones centered the Shaybah oil box in Saudi Arabia, the Shah fuel box southwest of Abu Dhabi and oil amenities in Fujairah.
One of the most seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates in conjunction with Abu Dhabi, Fujairah is strategically situated at the Gulf of Oman, outdoor the Strait of Hormuz, with direct get admission to to the Indian Ocean. Because of this, it has grown into the most important oil-loading and send fuel-supplying hub and is the terminus for the Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline.
Opened in 2012, that pipeline has a capability of one.5 million barrels according to day, overlaying greater than 1/2 of the UAE’s oil exports. Its repeated concentrated on all over the warfare indicates Iranian intent to disrupt one of the crucial two pipelines that bypass Hormuz. Up to now, the opposite pipeline, the East-West pipeline from the japanese Saudi oil fields to the Pink Sea port of Yanbu, has now not been centered.
However that might temporarily trade, as early on March 19 Saudi government reported {that a} drone had struck a refinery at Yanbu, whilst a ballistic missile that centered the port have been intercepted.
A July 1, 2025, picture equipped through the Houthis in Yemen displays the concentrated on of a business vessel within the Pink Sea.
Houthi Media Heart/Getty Photographs
Cascading dangers of additional power assaults
On a minimum of 4 events over the last decade, maximum lately in 2022, Houthi forces in Yemen – who’re allied with Iran– struck objectives across the East-West pipeline.
And in 2024 and 2025, in defiance of U.S. and Israeli coverage within the area, the Houthis led a marketing campaign towards delivery within the Pink Sea.
Thus far, the Houthis have kept away from becoming a member of the newest warfare, however they’ve threatened to take action. This kind of movements would motive monumental further disruption to grease markets.
Then again, the assault on Ras Laffan in Qatar and the broader threats to different power infrastructure within the Gulf have the possible on their very own to be catastrophic for a variety of causes.
Advanced within the Nineties, the commercial town of Ras Laffan is probably the most crucial cog in Qatar’s financial and effort panorama and the epicenter of the most important facility for the manufacturing and export of LNG on the earth. Fourteen massive LNG “trains” procedure the fuel from the North Box, which is then transported through vessels from the accompanying port to locations international.
Ras Laffan additionally properties gas-to-liquids amenities – those convert herbal fuel into liquid petroleum merchandise – in conjunction with a refinery and water and tool vegetation that produce desalinated water and generate electrical energy. Ras Laffan is slightly merely the engine that has powered Qatar’s meteoric expansion and upward thrust as an international energy dealer.
Early reviews counsel that the arena’s biggest gas-to-liquids plant, Pearl GTL, which is operated through Shell, was once broken all over the primary assault on Ras Laffan, and that the second one assault broken 17% of Qatar’s LNG capability, with upkeep projected to take 3 to 5 years. A 3-phased enlargement to the LNG amenities, which might upload an extra six LNG trains through 2027, could also be prone to be behind schedule.
The burning Gulf state catch 22 situation
What is apparent is that Iranian officers view the Israeli — or American — concentrated on of amenities of their territorial waters within the South Pars box as enough to justify hitting amenities at the Qatari aspect. That’s although Qatar forcefully condemned the Israeli strike on Asaluyeh as a deadly escalation, for causes that experience turn out to be all too actual.
There lies the nub of the catch 22 situation for Qatar and the 5 different Gulf states going through the brunt of the backlash from a warfare they attempted to avert via international relations.
On my visits to the area in fall 2025, it become transparent that many officers within the Gulf considered the ceasefire that ended the 12-day warfare as, at highest, a brief cessation of hostilities and feared that the following spherical of combating can be way more destructive, for Iran and for the area.
This has now come to cross. An embattled govt in Tehran that sees itself in an existential combat for survival has unfold the price of warfare as a ways and as huge as it will possibly.
Firefighters paintings as smoke rises outdoor a broken warehouse in an business house in Al Rayyan, Qatar, following an Iranian strike on March 1, 2026.
AP Picture
Officers statements from Gulf capitals that experience constantly – and as it should be – emphasised their direct noninvolvement within the U.S.-Israeli army marketing campaign have fallen on deaf ears in Tehran.
An incident on March 2 that noticed Qatar down two Iranian Soviet-era warring parties was once a defensive measure. The jets had entered Qatari airspace with the obvious intent to strike Al Udeid, the air base that properties the ahead headquarters of U.S. Central Command.
Then again, the scope of Iran’s assaults has long gone a ways past army amenities utilized by U.S. forces and feature hit the sectors – commute, tourism and wearing occasions – that put the area so firmly at the world map.
Nowhere is that this extra the case than the power sector that has underwritten and made conceivable the transformation of the Gulf states over the last half-century, and whose well being stays necessary to the worldwide economic system and provide chains in oil, fuel and lots of by-product merchandise.
If that sector stays firmly within the crosshairs, there’s no telling how intense the regional and world penalties of the continuing warfare in Iran might turn out to be.
