Airports, plants and ports: The civilian targets increasingly under threat in the Middle East
A fire blazes after an industrial building and a fuel tanker at Israel's Oil Refineries were hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile
By Tim Lister, Nadeen Ebrahim, CNN
(CNN) — One month into an expanding conflict in the Middle East, an increasing amount of civilian infrastructure is being struck – frequently by design.
Factories producing steel, aluminum and chemicals; refineries; reservoirs; desalination plants; civilian airports and universities have all been hit.
A few such targets might be described as underpinning a country’s war machine. Last week Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned of attacks on “additional targets and areas that assist the regime in building and operating weapons against Israeli civilians.” Soon afterwards, Israel stuck several steel plants.
Analysts say the economic and social costs of strikes by Iran and Israel are intensifying.
US strikes – so far – have tended to be more narrowly focused. But US President Donald Trump threatened Monday to “conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!),” in a post on Truth Social.
Iran has repeatedly warned that as its economic and social infrastructure is attacked, it will retaliate against similar facilities in countries supporting the US-Israeli campaign, even publishing evacuation orders in some cases.
“The retaliation for the attack on Iran’s infrastructure is being carried out by destroying strategic industries related to the American-Zionist enemy in the region,” said Brig. Gen. Majid Mousavi, aerospace commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, on Monday.
Energy industry under threat
In a region where the energy industry – oil, natural gas and petrochemicals – is the lifeblood of the economy, both Israel and Iran have targeted refineries and production sites – while the US has publicly said it is avoiding such targets.
Early in the conflict, Iranian drones struck part of the huge Ras Tanura refinery on Saudi Arabia’s east coast. A similar complex at Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been repeatedly attacked.
QatarEnergy declared force majeure – meaning that it could not fulfil contracts – after several Iranian strikes on Ras Laffan, one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities.
Kuwaiti refineries have also been targeted: the Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery came under two waves of attacks on March 19 alone.
Meanwhile an Iranian ballistic missile targeting Israel was intercepted Monday. But debris struck a refinery complex and started a fire in Haifa Bay on Monday, the second time the facility has been hit this month.
Israeli attacks have included targeting massive fuel storage tanks in Tehran on March 7, causing heavy pollution. While the Israelis said the tanks were used for military purposes, Amnesty International said “the potential for vast, predictable and devastating civilian harm caused by strikes on energy infrastructure” by all sides in the conflict – “means such attacks carry a substantial risk of violating international humanitarian law.”
Ports and aluminum plants
Iranian missiles and drones have hit ports in Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar. Tehran has also targeted Salalah and Duqm in Oman, two ports that function as partial bypass routes for the blocked Strait of Hormuz.
In turn, several Iranian ports have come under attack in Hormozgan province, the region that includes the Strait of Hormuz.
The UAE and Bahrain are important aluminium producers, and the closure of Hormuz has already led to supply shortages. On Saturday, Iranian drones and missiles struck both Aluminium Bahrain and a site belonging to Emirates Global Aluminium in Abu Dhabi, which said “significant damage” was done.
The price of aluminium jumped 5% in early London trading on Monday, following the attacks.
Those strikes came after two major steel plants – Mobarakeh and Khuzestan – in Iran were struck. “Six steel plants in Israel and in five regional countries have been declared new targets for potential retaliatory strikes by Iran,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
Travel hotspots no more
Doha in Qatar and Dubai in the UAE have in recent years become two of the most important hubs in the world for international travel.
Iranian drones have repeatedly but unsuccessfully targeted the airport in Doha and have caused damage at Dubai’s main international airport. Extensive delays and cancellations through both hubs have taken a heavy economic toll. Qatar Airways sent several of its planes to storage in Spain as its operations were cut.
Kuwait’s international airport was struck on Sunday, causing a massive fire and damage to radar systems.
In Iran, the main domestic airport in Tehran was hit repeatedly by Israeli strikes in mid-March – but the Israeli military said its targets were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) aircraft at the airport.
Desalination plants
In a region where fresh water is scarce, desalination plants are as important as oil refiuneries, supplying drinking water to roughly 100 million people in the Gulf. Early in the conflict, Bahraini officials said an Iranian drone had damaged a desalination plant, although the attack had not affected water supplies. And Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed on March 7 that the US hit a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island. The US denied involvement.
Iran pledged just a week ago that it would not hit Gulf desalination infrastructure. But Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity said one worker was killed in an Iranian attack on a power and water desalination Monday. Iranian state media accused Israel of carrying out the attack.
Assault on universities and research centers
The Israelis have struck universities and research centers in Iran, saying they are being used for military purposes. Malek Ashtar and Imam Hossein universities have been among the targets, as was Tehran’s University of Science and Technology at the weekend, according to the Fars news agency.
Iran denies military use of these sites, accusing Israel of aiming to cripple its scientific base. It has threatened to retaliate in kind.
Israeli universities “and American universities in the West Asia region are legitimate targets for us until two universities are struck in retaliation for the Iranian universities that have been destroyed,” it said Sunday.
New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus sent an email to students Sunday saying it had closed “out of abundance of caution.”
Hospitals and other civilian infrastructure
Iran has said dozens of hospitals and medical facilities have been damaged during the intensive US and Israeli bombardment over the last month, the latest being a psychiatric hospital in Tehran.
The World Health Organization verified 13 attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran in the early days of the campaign.
While there is no evidence that medical facilities have been deliberately targeted, they are sometimes close to targets in urban areas.
Similarly, a cruise missile strike targeting an IRGC base in southern Iran killed nearly 200 people, most of them children, at an adjacent school.
Spillover or Intent
Iran has frequently asserted it is focused on hitting US military bases in the Gulf – not the countries themselves. But it has warned that hotels housing US military personnel will also be considered targets. As the month has unfolded, an increasing number of obviously civilian facilities have been struck.
“Iran has targeted the region’s energy and transport infrastructure, the pillars of (Gulf Cooperation Council) GCC global power; in doing so it is seeking to damage Gulf citizens’, residents’ and investors’ confidence in these states’ ability to provide security to citizens and foreign workers,” says the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
With the conflict now into its second month and the number of purely military targets much reduced, the economic toll is likely to rise.
CNN’s Eugenia Yosef and Adam Pourahmadi contributed to this report.
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