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Iran has already attacked desalination plants. A major outage could leave cities reeling within days. An analysis.
Munich – The Middle East has many strategic Achilles heels: oil, gas, straits, pipelines. But in the spring of 2026, a new, possibly even more dangerous vulnerability will emerge: water. As missiles and drones fly between Iran, Israel, the USA and their regional partners, the focus is on an infrastructure that hardly anyone has noticed on the geopolitical map for decades: the desalination plants along the Persian Gulf. Without them, the region’s modern metropolises simply would not exist. And without them they could collapse within days.
Unlike Europe or North America, the Gulf region hardly has any natural freshwater sources. The states of the Arabian Peninsula literally built their civilization on desalinated sea water. Today, around 70 percent of drinking water in Saudi Arabia, around 90 percent in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and almost all demand in smaller Gulf states comes from desalination.
“Consequences would be dramatic”: water infrastructure becomes a military target
Anyone who attacks these systems is not only attacking infrastructure, but also the foundation of daily life. At the beginning of March, one such lifeline in Bahrain was damaged by an Iranian drone attack. This sets a dangerous precedent: water infrastructure becomes a military target.
Since then, attacks on other facilities have increased: In addition to Bahrain, facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar were also attacked by Iran and some were damaged. Each of these systems supplies millions of people with drinking water. The US has bombed a desalination plant in Iran that supplies around 30 villages with drinking water. Water production in the Gulf has thus become a central part of military calculations on both sides.
The consequences of a successful attack on a large desalination plant would be dramatic. Most Gulf states have only limited water storage; reserves are often only sufficient for a few days or at most weeks. After that, drinking water would have to be rationed. The Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh, home to eight million people, might even have to be evacuated, a nightmare that would shake the region politically and economically. Even Bahrain, Kuwait or Qatar could hardly compensate for a longer outage.
Therefore, the war between Israel and the United States against Iran could quickly escalate into a regional war over water. If Iran were to deliberately destroy a large desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates or Qatar, it would be more than a military escalation. It would be an attack on the survival of entire societies. The political logic would then be hard to stop: states from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to Kuwait would have little choice but to take military action against Iran and declare war on Tehran.
There is now only one way to stop this spiral of escalation before it really sets in motion: a political and international legal ban on attacks on water infrastructure. The Geneva Conventions already prohibit attacks on drinking water supply systems because they directly affect the civilian population. But paper does not protect pipelines or pumping stations, as the course of the war so far has taught us. What would be needed is an international initiative, supported by the USA, Europe, China and the Gulf states themselves, that treats desalination plants in a similar way to nuclear power plants: as an illegitimate target in the event of war.
It is currently not expected that the USA would lead such a movement. Donald Trump formulates his war goals in the staccato of contradictions. Sometimes he speaks of the “complete destruction” of Iran’s nuclear program, then again of a rapid withdrawal of American forces. At one point the conflict is said to be resolved “in days,” at another time he announces a “long operation.” This volatility hardly reflects the leadership that would be necessary for such an international undertaking. And as long as Washington itself cannot say clearly where this war should lead, no other state will want to muster the political energy to preemptively outlaw its most dangerous level of escalation.
