Water treatment centres within the Persian Gulf region are under threat amid the Iran war, with desalination plants in areas like Bahrain taking damage from strikes and threatening the local water supply.
Unlike attacks on military bases, personnel and equipment, attacks on energy and particularly civilian infrastructure are a brand new front line within the war, which not less than one expert says crosses a red line.
“It’s alarming that a majority of these infrastructure are targeted,” says Mohammed Mahmoud, lead for Middle East climate and water policy on the United Nations University Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
“It’s a red line in a sea of red lines, unfortunately, that happens during war, attacking civilian infrastructure like water infrastructure, since it directly has an impact on civilian populations to survive, and to me, that’s concerning.”
On March 8, Bahrain accused Iran of indiscriminately attacking civilian targets and damaging one among its desalination plants, though it didn’t say supplies had gone offline.
The island nation, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has been among the many countries targeted by Iranian drones and missiles.
Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike damaged an Iranian desalination plant.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said the strike on Iran’s plant had cut into the water supply for 30 villages. He warned that in doing so “the U.S. set this precedent, not Iran.”
Many Gulf desalination plants are physically integrated with power stations as cogeneration facilities, meaning attacks on electrical infrastructure could also hinder water production.
Desalination involves removing salt from seawater, which gets processed into clean drinking water and is used amongst nearly all of Persian Gulf nations as the first water source.
These desalination plants use a process often known as reverse osmosis.
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Jay Warber, an assistant professor within the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry on the University of Toronto, describes the method as a “membrane-based technique” where water is forced through a special polymer material, and tiny pores filter out salt and other impurities.
“If you happen to go inside one among these desalination plants, you’ll just see rows upon rows of what are called pressure vessels, and these are big plastic tubes which might be pressurized to tens of atmospheres of pressure, and within those you may have these membranes all rolled up, and it’s just rows upon rows because these items are big water factories,” says Warber.
“They produce an enormous amount of water, often from seawater, but additionally from other salty waters which you could find, groundwater and river water.”
To create the pressure needed to pump water through these facilities, Warber says an important amount of energy is required. This implies even a strike on energy infrastructure could not directly impact a desalination plant.
Why attack a desalination plant?
Mahmoud says beyond getting used for drinking, desalination at these facilities means cities have water that could be used for agriculture, industry, sanitation and health care.
“The Gulf states, particularly, really haven’t any other reliable source of water supply. They don’t have renewable fresh water. What I mean by that, they don’t have a system of rivers and streams that other countries can use and depend on for his or her water resource needs,” says Mahmoud.
“Impact to those plants has huge, huge, huge detrimental consequences due to how much water feeds into so many other things. There’s huge, huge cascading effects if those plants go offline.”
Striking water treatment plants means Iran shouldn’t be only fighting back with military force, but additionally targeting other nations’ civilian infrastructure, which puts local populations at serious risk.
It’s part of a bigger pattern of Iranian responses targeting neighbouring infrastructure and interests within the region.
Iran has attacked energy infrastructure targets within the Gulf region and blocked the Strait of Hormuz by threatening any vessels that try to go through the narrow chokepoint.
Limiting cargo and oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz has led to skyrocketing global oil and gas prices and knock-on effects to economies beyond the Middle East and even in Canada.
Higher oil prices and shipping volatility can mean strains to provide chains and speed up inflation, which implies consumers will wind up paying higher prices consequently of the war.
Those attacks on infrastructure like desalination plants have been largely from direct strikes causing physical damage, but there are also potential risks to their digital systems.
Are Canada’s water systems secure?
Canada’s Cyber Security Centre on March 9 warned of Iran’s risk of cyber attacks on infrastructure and other targets in Canada in response to the Iran war, and as allies of the U.S. and Israel are under attack no matter direct involvement or not.
“Canadian critical infrastructure operators and other possible targeted entities should remain vigilant to threats posed by cyber actors aligned with Iranian interests,” said the Canadian Cyber Security Centre on Monday in a bulletin.
It added: “Iranian state-sponsored cyber threat actors opportunistically goal poorly secured critical infrastructure (CI) networks and internet-connected devices all over the world, including those related to the water and energy sectors.”
A separate bulletin from the Cyber Security Centre posted in November 2025 also warned about Canada’s water systems being at high risk of potential cyber attacks.
“We assess that water systems are almost definitely a strategic goal for state-sponsored actors to project power through disruptive or destructive cyber threat activity,” said the Cyber Security Centre.
“We assess that state-sponsored actors have almost definitely developed pre-positioned access to Canadian water systems. Nonetheless, we judge that these actors would likely only disrupt those water systems in times of crisis or conflict between states.”
When asked for his thoughts on this, Mahmoud says water treatment facilities within the Persian Gulf could “absolutely” be vulnerable to a cyber attack.
“Loads of the water infrastructure and operations, water deliveries, transmission, numerous that is totally automated by way of how those plants and technologies operate. And so absolutely, a cyber attack could possibly be one approach to inflict damage within the sense of taking plants offline,” he says, and adds that ultimately a direct physical impact would do more and lasting damage to those facilities.
Mahmoud continued: “The opposite alarming part for me personally, with the work that I do, is now we’re moving from military targets towards civilian infrastructure. That has no, in my view, military value.”
– With files from The Associated Press