An Israeli missile fell a few hundred metres from the Bushehr nuclear power plant during the South Pars missile strike on March 18, threatening not only a nuclear disaster on the order of Chernobyl but cutting off the entire region from its fresh drinking water supplies. However, even if Bushehr is not hit, the war with Israel and the US is going to make Iran’s dire lack of water problem a lot worse.
The Iranian authorities warned the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on March 18 that the Bushehr NPP may be included as a possible Israeli target as Israel seeks to collapse the Iranian economy by destroying its source of income and its energy sector.
Built on the shores of the Gulf, the danger is that nuclear fuel, or even just the reactor’s cooling fluid, would spill into the Persian Gulf and contaminate it. The Gulf countries have little fresh water and are heavily dependent on approximately a hundred desalination plants along the coast. The production of dozens of these plants would be threatened and they would have been closed, causing a major humanitarian crisis that could force millions to leave the region.
So far Bushehr has been untouched, but the war itself is making Iran’s already dire water problem a lot worse. The lack of drinking water could play a decisive factor in the war if hostilities drag on.
As bne IntelliNews reported, Tehran was already facing the possibility of water rationing in December due to a record drought last year. By the end of January the crisis was becoming acute after fourteen dams across Iran's most densely populated provinces saw reserves fall below 10% capacity. The authorities warned that if “day zero” arrived, the capital might have to be evacuated.
Decades of overbuilding and mismanagement of some 600 dams have left Iran with silted, leaky reservoirs and critically low storage levels. Global warming and extreme temperatures as the Climate Crisis accelerates faster than scientists predicted is exacerbating the problem. Work to counter these problems is now impossible after the beginning of Operation Epic Fury has drained away all resources and decapitated the government.
In the summer of 2025, Tehran, along with several other large cities, had to reduce its water consumption as the dams that feed the city completely dried up. This summer the situation will be a lot worse as the region is on track for more record breaking heatwaves. The last three years have already been the hottest in recorded history.
Tehran is a city of about 9mn people and in the frontline for a potential water crisis. In November, President Masoud Pezeshkian took the unusual step of releasing a video warning residents evacuation of the capital could become necessary if rainfall did not arrive soon.
Iran has been enduring its worst drought since 2020 and years with very little rainfall are now ten-times more likely than they were before industrialisation, according to World Weather Attribution, which studies the role of greenhouse gas emissions in extreme weather.
Climate change has compounded the long standing structural problems with Iran’s water system, due to decades of poor water management, misallocation of resources, an inappropriate agriculture policy and corruption.
Iran is the fourteenth most water-stressed country in the world and more than four-fifths of its 93mn population faces extremely high water stress, Bloomberg reports.
And now its infrastructure is under threat from the war. The US took the radical decision and struck Iran’s desalination plant on the island of Qeshm in Strait of Hormuz March 7. Iran struck back, hitting a water facility in Bahrain, and raising the nightmare scenario of Iranian retaliatory strike on all the desalination plants in the region that would make the Gulf effectively uninhabitable. The US denied Tehran’s accusation that it was responsible for the Qeshm incident.
The Middle East hosts more than 40% of the world’s desalination capacity, yet Iran relies on it far less than its neighbours. Only about 3% of the country’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, compared with more than half in Saudi Arabia and around 90% in Kuwait. Iran’s water problem is not caused by its lack of naturally occurring water, but the shoddy state of its infrastructure.
The development of the infrastructure was shaped by political patronage rather than long-term planning. Contracts were handed out to allies of the state and military – a network widely referred to inside Iran as the “water mafia”, a term used by Donald Trump in May in a speech in Riyadh.
Poor agricultural policy has added to the strain on the system -- agriculture accounts for roughly 90% of water use - by promoting water-intensive crops and attempting to be self-sufficient in food production, when it would make more sense to use the water for other means and import goods from more verdant neighbours.
The heavy use of water in agriculture was exacerbated by expanding farming into some of Iran’s driest regions which accelerated groundwater depletion and drained aquifers.
Iran’s short lived rainy season is already over and the intense heat of summer is on its way. Authorities fear a repeat of 2023 when Iran declared a two-day holiday in August after temperatures topped a record 50°C – one of the hottest summers on record. As the disaster season gets underway, this year could be at least as bad, or possibly worse. Climate models from bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Copernicus predict a high probability (around 80–90%) that one of the next few years will set a new all-time global temperature record.
Iran Can Escalate The Energy War In The Gulf To Water – Analysis
Al Khobar Water Tower located in Al Khobar Corniche, Saudi Arabia.
March 21, 2026
By Hudson Institute
By Can Kasapoğlu
Energy Warfare and The Expansion of the Gulf Battlespace
On March 18, the Israel Defense Forces struck upstream energy production facilities at Iran’s South Pars gas field. South Pars is not a peripheral asset—it sits at the core of Iran’s energy system and is the world’s largest natural gas field. It underpins roughly three-quarters of Iran’s domestic output.
Damage on this scale directly affects electricity generation and industrial output. It also undermines regime stability. In Iran, energy shortages are not technical issues; they are leverage points. In effect, the Epic Fury–Roaring Lion campaign is introducing a new dimension of political warfare. The focus is no longer solely on degrading the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) military capabilities. Instead, the campaign is now shifting toward shaping internal conditions within Iran—applying sustained pressure on the regime’s ability to provide services, govern, and uphold its already weakened social contract with a population under immense strain. Over the past twenty days without internet, for example, Iranian society has experienced Orwellian isolation from the rest of the world.
Tehran’s response expanded the scope of the conflict. Iranian drones and missiles struck energy infrastructure across the Gulf, including facilities connected to Qatar’s North Field—the geological twin of South Pars and a key global liquid natural gas (LNG) hub. The conflict escalated beyond bilateral exchanges. Iranian retaliation has grimly introduced systemic risk into an already unstable Middle East threat environment.
In the meantime, the United States Central Command conducted strikes against hardened Iranian anti-ship missile positions along the Strait of Hormuz. These strikes can either reflect the American effort to reopen the critical chokepoint for good or, in a low-probability and high-impact scenario, the prelude of an amphibious assault on the Kharg Island, particularly given recent American strikes on the military targets on the island. Kharg looms large as the nerve center of Iran’s economy and a hub of almost 90 percent of the country’s oil exports.
Energy markets responded swiftly to the chain of escalatory trends. Prices increased as upstream production and LNG infrastructure came under pressure. However, a more significant development underpins market volatility: water may shape the next phase of the conflict.
Marking the Hydro-Strategic Threat in the Gulf
When the political and military elite of the Islamic Republic assessed their strategic options after the United States and Israel began Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, they calculated what few analysts anticipated: that the path to fracturing the coalition arrayed against Tehran ran not through Israel but through the Gulf Arab states. The IRGC, the regime’s praetorian deterrent, know they cannot defeat the American-led coalition militarily. Instead, they seek to raise the economic and diplomatic costs of the war sufficiently to break President Donald Trump’s will to continue waging it.
Iran has aimed almost half its long-range strikes at the United Arab Emirates. It hopes to weaken the resilience of America’s Gulf Arab allies. The Islamic Republic’s military strategy is designed to make a sustained US war effort politically unsustainable in Washington.
To achieve this, Iranian missile and drone forces might target a resource that is scarce and crucial in the Gulf Arab region: water. Iran has tried to close the Strait of Hormuz and struck oil and gas sites throughout the area. Oil markets dominate the strategic picture for now. Yet the vulnerability of desalination infrastructure is a different category of risk. Energy disruptions primarily trigger economic consequences by raising prices and constraining supply. Water disruption, by contrast, directly threatens daily survival in some of the world’s most water-scarce states.
Desalination is the Gulf Arab nations’ primary way of providing drinkable water to their people. About 90 percent of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from desalination, as does 86 percent of Oman’s and around 70 percent of Saudi Arabia’s. As a result, any postwar settlement that ignores Iran’s ability to threaten the desalination infrastructure that allows the Gulf Arab nations to function leaves the region exposed to continued Iranian blackmail. From the Guards’ perspective, this asymmetry makes water infrastructure an attractive coercive lever even if oil remains the region’s most globally visible strategic commodity.
US intelligence agencies raised a red flag on this danger long before the current war began. A declassified Central Intelligence Agency assessment, approved for release in 2010, concluded that potable water had already become a strategic commodity across the Gulf Arab states. The region’s leaders view this resource as more vital to national survival than oil. The CIA report identified Iran as the greatest threat to the region’s desalination infrastructure and cautioned that more than 90 percent of the region’s drinkable water production depended on just 56 plants. Damaging these facilities could trigger consequences more severe than the loss of any other industry. Today’s battlefield shows the CIA’s warnings come to fruition. Thus far, Iran has already struck a desalination plant in Bahrain, marking a dangerous path ahead. The Islamic Republic, moreover, has threatened to continue widespread strikes against the Gulf’s water resources.
When it comes to water, geography makes the region even more vulnerable. This exposure cannot be engineered away. Desalination needs direct seawater intake, so plants are built along coastlines. That means nations must put critical infrastructure on narrow, low-lying coastal strips with little defensive depth. The Islamic Republic sees these strips as sitting ducks.
Militarily, desalination plants are classic soft-skin targets. They are sprawling facilities, not hardened structures. Moderate physical damage to pumps and intake systems can disable plants for long periods. Repairing complex, specialized equipment can take time. Oil supply fluctuations can be managed with reserves or price changes, but water scarcity cannot. When water is disrupted, the situation can quickly turn into a public health crisis.
Damaging desalination plants fits Iran’s likely operational playbook in any future conflict. The regime can rebuild its missile arsenal with support from China, North Korea, and Russia. Hardline elements supporting new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei will likely stay in power. The Islamic Republic may become a new North Korea of sorts: a military dictatorship with both the capability and will to threaten neighbors—especially their water facilities.
While Epic Fury aims to dismantle Iran’s drone and missile programs, the Revolutionary Guards’ economic blackmail can hold Gulf water supplies hostage. Washington must make clear that threats to Gulf Arab water are intolerable and will incur overwhelming consequences.
Previous diplomatic frameworks for dealing with Iran have focused almost exclusively on Tehran’s nuclear program, as the nuclear deal inked during the Obama presidency. In seeking to resolve the current conflict, Washington and its partners should realize that Iran does not need nuclear weapons to threaten the region’s military balance.
Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute
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