Trump threatens to destroy Iran's desalination plants. Here’s what that could mean for the Mideast

The biggest danger, analysts warn, may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate. Iran relies on desalination for a small share of its water supply while Gulf Arab states depend on it for the vast majority.

Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities — such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates or Doha, Qatar's capital — could not sustain their current populations.

“Desalination facilities are oftentimes necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” said Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

While less reliant on desalination, Iran's water situation is dire

After a fifth year of extreme drought, some Iranian media reports say reservoirs supplying Tehran, the country's capital, are below 10% capacity. Satellite pictures analyzed by The Associated Press also show reservoirs noticeably depleted. The country still draws most of its water from rivers, reservoirs and depleted underground aquifers.

Israeli airstrikes on March 7 on oil depots surrounding Tehran produced heavy smoke and acid rain. Experts warned the fallout could contaminate soil and parts of the city’s water supply.

“Attacking water facilities, even one, could end up being harmful to the population in such a severe water scarcity context,” Jafarnia said.

Before the war that Israel and the United States launched on Feb. 28, Iran had been racing to expand desalination along its southern coast and pump some of the water inland, but infrastructure constraints, energy costs and international sanctions have sharply limited scalability.

Across the Gulf, many desalination plants are tied to power stations

In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

Even where the plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s an asymmetrical tactic,” he said. “Iran doesn’t have the same capacity to strike back ... But it does have this possibility to impose costs on the Gulf countries to push them to intervene or call for a cessation of hostilities.”

Desalination plants have multiple stages — intake systems, treatment facilities, energy supplies — and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production, according to Ed Cullinane, Mideast editor at Global Water Intelligence, a publisher serving the water industry.

“None of these assets are any more protected than any of the municipal areas that are currently being hit by ballistic missiles or drones,” Cullinane said.

The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies. Fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill.

“Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers,” said Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. “It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”

Trump’s comments came as the conflict intensified, with Tehran striking a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait and an oil refinery in Israel coming under attack, while U.S. and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes on Iran.

US and Gulf governments have long recognized the risk

A 2010 CIA analysis warned that attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states, and prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed. More than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants, the report stated, and “each of these critical plants is extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested in pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies designed to cushion short-term disruptions. But smaller states such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have fewer backup supplies.

Desalination has expanded in part because climate change is intensifying drought across the region. The plants themselves are highly energy-intensive and emit massive amounts of carbon, while their coastal locations make them vulnerable to extreme weather and rising seas.

Past Mideast conflicts have seen attacks on desalination plants

During Iraq’s 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait, retreating Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities, said Low, from the University of Utah, while millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Persian Gulf, which threatened seawater intake pipes used by desalination plants across the region.

Workers rushed to deploy protective booms around the intake valves of major facilities but the destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took years.

In recent years, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities as tensions escalated.

International humanitarian law, including provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities.

Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.

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