Tehran has threatened to strike vital electrical plants across the Middle East if Donald Trump bombs power stations in Iran.
The threat is made more precarious on condition that Gulf Arab states have each their electrical and water supplies intermingled, with power stations needed to desalinate their drinking water.
Over the weekend, Iran launched missiles targeting Dimona in Israel, near a facility key to its long-suspected atomic weapons programme. The Israeli facility was not damaged within the barrage.
Fatih Birol, the pinnacle of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, warned that the crisis within the Middle East has had a worse impact on energy markets than the 2 oil shocks of the Seventies and the Russia-Ukraine war combined.
Still, earlier today, Israel launched recent attacks on the Iranian capital to focus on infrastructure in Tehran.
Trump also said the US would attack Iran’s power stations unless the country releases its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
His self-declared 48-hour deadline expires just before midnight GMT on Tuesday, further raising the stakes of the continuing war with Iran.
Trump said in a social media post that if Tehran didn’t open the strategic waterway to all ships, america would ‘obliterate’ Iran’s power plants.
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said on Monday that if the US did that, Iran would respond by hitting power plants in all areas that offer electricity to American bases, ‘in addition to the economic, industrial and energy infrastructures wherein Americans have shares’.
The Fars news agency, which is near the Revolutionary Guard, published a listing of such sites in what gave the impression to be a veiled threat.
It includes desalination plants in addition to the UAE’s Barakah nuclear power plant, which has 4 reactors out within the western deserts of the country near its border with Saudi Arabia.
Iran has also said it’s going to completely close the Strait if Trump follows through with the threat to attack Iranian power plants.
Iran’s death toll within the war has surpassed 1,500, its health ministry has said.
In Israel, 15 people have been killed by Iranian strikes. Greater than a dozen civilians within the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states have been killed in strikes.
In Lebanon, authorities say Israeli strikes targeting Iran-linked militia Hezbollah have killed greater than 1,000 people and displaced a couple of million.
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