Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and neighboring international locations within the Persian Gulf area use the fossil fuels underneath their desolate tract lands now not simplest to make cash, but in addition to make consuming water. The petroleum they produce powers greater than 400 desalination vegetation, which flip seawater into drinkable water.
Within the warfare that started on Feb. 28, 2026, with U.S. and Israeli assaults on Iran, retaliatory assaults from Iranian forces have hit oil refineries and herbal gasoline vegetation and disrupted tourism and aviation. The ones assaults all harm Gulf countries’ economies and their hard-won reputations for protection and steadiness.
However Iranian moves have additionally already hit with reference to a key desalination plant in Dubai. Iranian moves on March 2 on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port hit about 12 miles (20 kilometers) clear of an enormous complicated with 43 desalination gadgets which are key to the town’s manufacturing of greater than 160 billion gallons of water each and every yr.
And there has already been injury to the UAE’s Fujairah F1 energy and water plant and at Kuwait’s Doha West plant. In each instances, the wear turns out to have stemmed from assaults on within sight ports or from falling particles from drone interceptions.
The interior workings of desalination vegetation can also be huge and really complicated.
Fayez Nureldine/AFP by the use of Getty Pictures
Saltwater kingdoms
The area’s monarchies are frequently described as petro-states, however they’ve additionally develop into what I name saltwater kingdoms, international superpowers within the manufacturing of human-made recent water drawn from the ocean. Desalination is a part of the rationale there are golfing lessons, fountains, water parks or even indoor ski slopes with manufactured snow.
All in combination, 8 of the ten greatest desalination vegetation on this planet are within the Arabian Peninsula. Israel’s two Sorek vegetation spherical out the listing.
The international locations of the Arabian Peninsula have about 60% of world water-desalination capability. And vegetation with reference to Iran, across the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, produce greater than 30% of the sector’s desalinated water.
More or less 100 million other people within the Gulf area depend on desalination vegetation for his or her water. With out them, virtually no one would be capable to are living in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE – or a lot of Saudi Arabia, together with its capital, Riyadh.
An enormous indoor ski house in Dubai is simply some of the techniques Gulf countries use desalinated water.
Karim Sahib/AFP by the use of Getty Pictures
Sabotage of water provides
CIA worries about assaults on Gulf area desalination vegetation date again to the Eighties. All over Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the ones worries changed into actual.
After coalition forces started bombing Iraqi positions in January 1991, a part of Iraqi troops’ reaction was once to liberate tens of millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf. As the large oil slick drifted south, U.S. and Saudi officers feared it was once intended to sabotage desalination programs.
Employees put in protecting booms to protect consumption valves at primary vegetation, particularly the one who provides a lot of Riyadh’s water. In Kuwait, Iraqi sabotage broken or destroyed a lot of the rustic’s desalination capability.
Kuwaiti government additionally grew to become to Turkey and Saudi Arabia to offer some 750 water tankers and 200 vans to import an 18-ton emergency provide of bottled water. U.S.-supplied turbines and cellular desalination gadgets equipped further transient reduction, although the total restoration took years.
Oil washes up on a Persian Gulf seaside close to a Saudi desalination plant in overdue January 1991.
Chris Lefkow/AFP by the use of Getty Pictures
Newer threats
Fears of assaults on desalination vegetation resurfaced after Yemen’s Houthi motion introduced drones and missiles at Saudi amenities at Al-Shuqaiq in 2019 and 2022 – although they did no lasting injury.
Iran’s guns are way more a large number of and complicated than the Houthis’, although, so if it attacked desalination vegetation, the wear might be important.
There may be an underestimation right here: Iran’s capital town of Tehran has a water scarcity disaster so critical that during 2025 the federal government reportedly regarded as relocating the drought-stricken capital to the coast. However Iran is much less susceptible to assaults on desalination, as a result of its water provide is predicated as an alternative on dams and wells.
No matter else the warfare could also be about, water may just smartly develop into a significant component within the violence and depart lasting political scars. And if both sides have been to deliberately assault water resources or desalination vegetation, it could obviously be a human-rights violation.
