There’s a commodity even more vital than oil and gas in the Middle East — and it’s at risk as war heats up | CNNOn particularly bad, sleep...

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There’s a commodity even more vital than oil and gas in the Middle East — and it’s at risk as war heats up | CNNOn particularly bad, sleep...
There’s a commodity even more vital than oil and gas in the Middle East — and it’s at risk as war heats up | CNN

On particularly bad, sleepless nights, Sofia finds herself worrying about whether the taps might run dry. “We are, at the end of the day, in a desert,” said the United Arab Emirates resident. Oil and gas may be at the heart of the economy, but water is “the basis of our survival.”

As the Iran war escalates, so do her fears. “If I were to put myself in the shoes of the enemy, for lack of a better term … this is what I would target, our most valuable resources … I never thought that I could be in danger of not having potable water,” said Sofia, who asked that her real name not be used.

She is not alone, concerns are growing across the region that one of its greatest strengths could become a target of war.

The arid countries of the Gulf, including the UAE, are exceptionally dependent on desalination, the process of converting seawater into drinking water. It’s why this acutely water scarce region is home to lush golf courses, vast water parks and ski slopes; it’s also why it faces an increasingly alarming vulnerability.

Bahraini officials said on Sunday an Iranian drone had damaged a desalination plant, although not affected water supplies. The attack followed Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi’s accusation that the US hit a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island affecting 30 villages, which he called a “dangerous move.” The US denied involvement.


This apparent tit-for-tat highlights the potential danger posed to the hundreds of desalination plants in the Gulf that supply drinking water to roughly 100 million people. While Iran still gets most of its water from rivers and groundwater, the Gulf has few natural freshwater resources. Some countries — including Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain — rely on desalination for almost all drinking water.

A concerted attack on that infrastructure would be an almost “unthinkable escalation,” Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, told CNN.

But experts say the norms of war are shifting.

If attacks on desalination plants are “the beginning of a military policy and not just mistakes or collateral damage, this is both illegal — a war crime — and a very concerning development, as (Gulf) countries have only a few weeks of water storage,” said Laurent Lambert, an associate professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, in Qatar.

‘Saltwater kingdoms’
Oil and gas transformed the Gulf from a region characterized by sparsely populated states, to wealthy countries with gleaming, bustling cities within decades. But what many miss in this story is the impact of desalination, fueled by the same oil and gas, which has allowed populations to boom in desert countries with barely any rivers.

Employees work in the pipeline control room of the Saline Water Conversion Corporation in Ras al-Khair, Saudi Arabia, in October 2020.

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https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/11/climate/gulf-iran-war-water-desalination?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/CNN

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