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KEY POINTS:
72 million residents in the Middle East are vulnerable to U.S. and Iranian threats to attack desalination plants.
Turning seawater to freshwater is essential to life in one of Earth’s driest and hottest regions.
Dress rehearsal of danger already witnessed during the 1991 Iraq war.
Missiles tracing dragon tail flames across the Middle Eastern sky were alarming enough. But it was a threat President Trump issued on March 30 that truly stopped people cold across all six Persian Gulf (GCC) nations and Israel, regardless of background or allegiance. That day, amid his escalating rhetoric toward Iran, Trump floated a reckless and illegal proposal: achieving victory by “blowing up and completely obliterating” vital civilian infrastructure, including Iran’s desalination plants.
Why would 62 million Persian Gulf residents and 10 million Israelis care about roughly 100 small plants that convert seawater to just 3 percent of Iran’s freshwater? Because Iran’s military leaders vowed that U.S. strikes to their desalination plants invites retaliation that would be “much more devastating and widespread.”
That potential of return fire is terrifying. The big, energy-intensive desalination plants along the Gulf and Mediterranean shorelines are the region’s primary sources of drinking water, and the principal reason that 72 million people in the GCC and Israel don’t perish from thirst.
In effect, the dueling threats between Trump and Iran’s military sharply escalated a brutish concept in international hostility, now made even more dangerous by the planet’s drying condition. Enemy nations are wargaming attacks on water supply. It’s the water equivalent of MAD – “mutually assured destruction” – the term that emerged at the height of the U.S.-Soviet cold war six decades ago to encompass the catastrophe of a nuclear war.
There isn’t much that produces agreement between Gulf nations and Israel. Safeguarding desalination capacity, though, is a rare area of mutual understanding.
Due to their essential importance, targeting desalination is not a new idea, though it’s been confined – so far – to the Persian Gulf. The Pacific Institute, a California-based water research center, publishes a Water Conflict Chronology database that documents the first attack in 1991, during the Gulf War, when Iraq destroyed much of Kuwait’s desalination capacity. From 2016 to 2023 desalination plants in Yemen were bombed by Saudi Arabia and Houthi forces were accused of firing missiles at desalination plants in Saudi Arabia. Israel damaged, destroyed, or shut down much of Gaza’s water system, including its desalination plant, after the Hamas attack in October 2023.
“None of those instances garnered the attention that the recent events in Iran and the Gulf have produced,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow. “The reason is because no region in the world is more dependent on desalination than the Gulf.”
Vital Technology, Essential Purpose
Israel and the GCC nations – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – have spent billions of dollars building, and billions more operating desalination plants precisely to respond to ecological conditions that would otherwise make much of the Middle East uninhabitable. Between 2006 and 2024, countries across the Middle East collectively spent over $50 billion building and upgrading desalination facilities, and nearly that much operating them.
The Gulf states alone produce roughly 40 percent of the world’s desalinated water, operating more than 400 plants across the region. In Qatar desalination accounts for 99 percent of its total drinking water supply; in Kuwait 90 percent; in Israel 85 percent; in Saudi Arabia 70 percent, and in the UEA 42 percent.
Although the first small desalination plants were developed in the Gulf in the early 20th century, the 21st-century seawater-to-freshwater plant is huge, expertly engineered, and highly vulnerable to attack. In 2013, I joined Circle of Blue Director Carl Ganter on a tour of the natural gas-fired Ras Laffan B and C plant near Doha, Qatar. Completed just a few years before we arrived, the facility – which produced freshwater and electricity – was a staggeringly impressive steel bird’s nest of piping and pumping that trembled in the roar of rushing water and fire. The data points that measured Ras Laffan’s significance: It generated 3,755 megawatts of power – a quarter of Qatar’s electricity – and 150 million gallons of freshwater daily, or 20 percent of total supply.
The potential for such an expansive, expensive, and exposed water supply facility being imperiled emerged in early March. According to the New York Times, Iran’s foreign minister accused the U.S. of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting the water supply to nearly 30 villages. The U.S. denied responsibility.
In the weeks after, Bahrain and Kuwait reported damage to desalination plants and blamed Iran, according to the Times, though Iran also denied responsibility.
CIA Warning
Desalinated water supply in the region is expected to keep growing fast to meet the demand of a fast-expanding population. Daily capacity in the six-nation GCC – now about 7 billion cubic meters annually (1.8 trillion gallons) – is anticipated to increase to 11 billion cubic meters by 2028. Qatar, for instance, surpassed the Ras Laffan plant’s output earlier this year when it opened the Umm Al Houl desalination plant that produces almost 160 million gallons a day.
In 1983, the Central Intelligence Agency prepared a report that found “disruption of desalination facilities in most of the Arab countries could have more serious consequences than the loss of any other industry or commodity.” Translated: A serious attack on the water supply would initiate, in a matter of days, a crisis of disease, hunger, and thirst among any Middle East nation’s civilian population. Children and infants would be most at risk.
A dress rehearsal of the terrible danger that Trump and Iran’s military introduced in March occurred in 1991 during the Gulf War. Blackouts and resulting water outages in Iraq led to epidemics of typhoid, cholera, gastroenteritis, and malaria. According to a report in The Lancet, a British medical journal, 100,000 Iraqis died due to health consequences from the war. Child mortality more than tripled.
There is no justification for the U.S. or Iran to attack the freshwater supplies for so many defenseless people. Doing so would not just be a deliberate violation of international law, it would be a murderous and premeditated act of pure evil.