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In a landmark official statement released Thursday, Saudi Arabia’s energy ministry confirmed that coordinated attacks on its critical East-West oil pipeline have eliminated 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) of production capacity — equal to roughly 10 percent of the kingdom’s current total oil exports.

The ministry’s announcement marked the first time Riyadh has publicly acknowledged that Iranian strikes have caused meaningful damage to its national energy infrastructure, a revelation that lands just 48 hours before high-stakes US-Iran peace negotiations are set to kick off in Islamabad, Pakistan. Among the targets hit was a key pumping station along the East-West pipeline, the kingdom’s primary alternative route for getting Gulf crude to global markets after Iran blocked commercial vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s busiest chokepoint for oil trade. Connecting Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Gulf coast to the Red Sea export terminal at Yanbu, the pipeline had previously been operating at full 7 million bpd capacity, per earlier reporting from Bloomberg. The attack cut that pumped volume by 10 percent overnight.

Beyond the pipeline strike, Riyadh also confirmed that two major oil processing facilities, Manifa and Khurais, were targeted in earlier Iranian attacks. Those strikes reduced combined production capacity at the two sites by an additional 600,000 bpd. Iranian forces also struck major refining complexes in four key Saudi locations: Jubail, Ras Tanura, Yanbu and the capital Riyadh. Those hits have directly cut into the kingdom’s ability to ship refined petroleum products to global buyers.

In its official statement, the energy ministry warned that the ongoing wave of attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure carries severe consequences for global energy security. “The continuation of these attacks leads to supply shortages and slows the pace of recovery, impacting the security of supplies for beneficiary countries and contributing to increased volatility in oil markets,” the statement read.

The public confirmation marks a sharp shift from Riyadh’s previous approach, which saw the kingdom stay largely silent on damage from repeated attacks on its energy assets. The announcement comes amid a fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran, announced earlier this week, that Saudi Arabia has publicly welcomed. Multiple international outlets including the Financial Times have reported that other Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait have also faced continued Iranian strikes in recent days, though violence had tapered off by Thursday.

Diplomatic preparations for the Saturday talks in Pakistan have accelerated in recent days. On Thursday, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan held separate calls with his Pakistani counterpart Mohammad Ishaq Dar and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a close strategic partner of both Islamabad and Riyadh, Pakistan’s role as mediator for the talks was only possible with explicit approval from the Saudi government, unnamed diplomats told Middle East Eye. The talks come amid shifting geopolitical alignments in the region: earlier reporting from MEE confirmed that Saudi Arabia recently granted the US military access to King Fahd Air Base in western Saudi Arabia, after Washington pressured Riyadh to back the US-Israeli campaign against Iran.

A group of leading Middle East policy experts warned Thursday that extensive damage to over a dozen U.S. military installations across the Gulf region from Iran’s retaliatory strikes has flipped the strategic calculus of America’s decades-long military presence in the area – turning long-held security assets into major liabilities that create more risk than they mitigate.

Details of the severe damage to the bases, which multiple outlets have described as effectively uninhabitable, were first revealed in a New York Times report last month, but the Trump administration has still not publicly confirmed the full scope of the destruction.

Speaking at the Arab Center Washington DC’s annual conference, Marc Lynch, director of George Washington University’s Project on Middle East Political Science, called the bases the physical foundation of decades of American primacy in the Middle East, noting Iran effectively rendered that infrastructure useless in just one month. Lynch emphasized that U.S. officials have failed to release a full, transparent accounting of the damage sustained across the installations, which are tightly restricted by both the Pentagon and host Gulf nations including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman.

Lynch shared that regional contacts have shared on-the-ground imagery of damage to Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet that hosts roughly 9,000 U.S. military personnel. He argued that the widespread damage to regional bases has made the strategic position of the Fifth Force in Bahrain untenable, saying the risk of further attacks is too great to reestablish a full permanent presence there. “So in a sense, the entire purpose of ‘America’s Middle East’ has come crashing down [and] we don’t have an alternative way yet of articulating or thinking about what might replace it,” Lynch added.

In total, 19 publicly acknowledged U.S. military sites are spread across the broader Middle East, stretching from Egypt to Iraq and from northern Syria to southern Oman, holding up to 50,000 total U.S. service members. The U.S. military presence in the region dates to the late 1950s, but the large-scale network of active bases in the Gulf took shape after the 1990 Gulf War, built on a long-standing core agreement: the U.S. would provide security guarantees to Gulf states in exchange for access to energy resources and a stable petrodollar system.

That decades-old arrangement has now collapsed following the recent wave of Iranian strikes that came in response to U.S. and Israeli attacks, experts say. Gulf states have been forced to drain their air defense interceptor stockpiles, shut down civilian airports and schools, and suffer major damage to key energy production facilities, eroding any remaining benefits of the security agreement for host nations.

Shana R Marshall, associate director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, told the conference that as the benefits of the transactional relationship between the U.S. and Gulf states have eroded sharply, the bilateral relationship is inevitably fraying. Marshall noted that tensions over U.S. basing are not new, pointing to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. service members in Saudi Arabia, and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden’s long-stated core grievance over the permanent presence of U.S. troops in the Gulf. “Close relations with the U.S., whether it’s U.S. military bases or promoting normalisation with Israel, or enforcing U.S. sanctions or maintaining the dollar peg of their currencies, is less a benefit now than actually a liability,” Marshall explained.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, added that the seven-week escalation has made clear Gulf states can no longer count on the U.S. as a reliable security partner, a sentiment amplified by the recent ceasefire deal that failed to explicitly end Iranian attacks on U.S.-linked assets across the Gulf. The omission has left many Gulf leaders feeling betrayed, Parsi said.

“Those bases were not a deterrent against Iranian attacks. Instead, they became the target of those attacks. They became magnets for those attacks, and as a result, reliance on the American security umbrella really seems to be in shatters,” Parsi explained.

Parsi outlined one likely outcome of this shift: disillusioned Gulf states that cannot reach a new security accommodation with Iran may pivot toward Israel as an alternative security partner. Unlike the 2020 Abraham Accords, which were anchored by explicit U.S. security guarantees, Parsi said this potential shift could happen even without major new concessions from the U.S., driven purely by Gulf states’ loss of faith in American security commitments. “There may be some sort of a gravitation towards Israel among some of these [Gulf] states, if they believe that they either cannot or do not want to find a new relationship with Iran,” he added.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Iran war that has choked global energy supply chains, Singapore — a small tropical city-state long synonymous with near-universal, often excessive air conditioning use — has rolled out mandatory energy-saving measures for its public sector, joining a growing number of Asian nations grappling with spiking fuel prices. On April 8, Singapore’s Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment announced that all government employees must adjust office air conditioning thermostats to a minimum of 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), alongside strict requirements to monitor runtime of cooling systems. The guidance notes that every one-degree increase in cooling temperature cuts energy consumption by roughly 10%, a significant efficiency gain for the power-reliant nation. Beyond temperature adjustments, public offices will also roll out energy-efficient upgrades including LED lighting systems and smart power sensors to further cut unnecessary energy use.

Singapore’s reliance on air conditioning runs deep in the nation’s modern history. As founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of Singapore’s transformation from a resource-poor post-colonial outpost to one of Asia’s wealthiest advanced economies, once famously noted, air conditioning was the foundational innovation that enabled reliable indoor work in the region’s sweltering tropical climate. Shortly after taking office, Lee installed air conditioning in all civil service buildings, calling the move critical to boosting public sector efficiency. Decades later, air conditioning has permeated nearly every corner of daily life in Singapore: nearly all offices, shopping malls, public transit vehicles and the vast majority of private homes have permanent cooling systems. It is common for office workers to keep cardigans or sweaters at their desks to combat overcooled indoor spaces, and pedestrians walking past mall entrances are often hit with gusts of frigid air vented out to the street. For years, observers have pointed out that the nation’s cooling use far exceeds what is necessary for comfort.

The current energy crisis stems from the Iran war, which has effectively closed off the Strait of Hormuz — the critical shipping chokepoint through which most of the Middle East’s oil and gas exports travel to global markets. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, roughly two-thirds of Singapore’s crude oil imports originate from Middle Eastern nations, leaving the country heavily exposed to supply disruptions. Local fuel prices have already climbed sharply, and Singaporean authorities have warned the public to prepare for further economic disruptions tied to the Middle East conflict. As of early April, the nation has not tapped its strategic fuel reserves or implemented fuel rationing.

Singapore is far from alone in taking urgent action across Southeast Asia and broader Asia. Thailand, another major economy dependent on Hormuz shipping, has ordered public sector employees to work from home and asked all residents to set home and office air conditioning between 26 and 27 degrees Celsius, while encouraging carpooling and greater use of public transport to cut fuel consumption. The Philippines, which sources 98% of its total oil imports from the Middle East, became the first Asian nation to declare a national energy emergency in March after petrol prices more than doubled in just a few weeks. Manila has shortened the workweek for all government offices and ordered public agencies to cut overall electricity and fuel use. Even South Korea, which imports more than two-thirds of its total energy from the Gulf region, has launched a nationwide energy-saving campaign urging residents to take shorter showers and only run washing machines on weekends to cut overall power demand.

Energy analyst Ichiro Kutani, of Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics, described the broader economic fallout from the Iran war as an emerging “Asian energy crisis”. He noted that developing economies across the region are bearing the brunt of the shock, due to their high volume of gasoline-powered vehicles and widespread household reliance on gas for energy. In the long term, Kutani argued, the crisis serves as a critical wake-up call for the entire region: “We have to learn from this crisis, and work toward both more efficient oil use and greater diversification of our energy supply sources to prevent similar shocks in the future.”

A groundbreaking new investigation by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has concluded that the widespread sexual torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees from Gaza held in Israeli detention facilities constitutes an organized state policy, explicitly endorsed by Israel’s highest political, military and judicial authorities. The report, which was shared exclusively with Middle East Eye, draws its chilling conclusions from first-hand testimonies collected from dozens of recently released Palestinian former detainees, painting a devastating picture of systematic, institutionalized cruelty across Israel’s prison network.

Accounts from survivors center heavily on Sde Teiman, the notoriously opaque detention facility where independent monitors and legal representatives have long been barred from access. One 42-year-old female detainee from northern Gaza, who was held at the site, described being bound naked to a metal table and repeatedly raped by two masked soldiers over a 48-hour period. She told researchers she was left shackled, naked and bleeding through the night before the assaults resumed the next day, recalling that her captors filmed the entire ordeal. Later, while she was hung by her wrists during interrogation, soldiers played the footage back to her and threatened to release it publicly if she refused to cooperate with their demands. Describing the unrelenting horror of her experience, she said she begged for death and framed the abuse as “another genocide behind walls.”

Multiple male survivors shared similarly graphic accounts of brutality, often involving the use of military dogs trained to carry out sexual assault. Amir, a 35-year-old detainee also held at Sde Teiman, recalled being forced to strip naked before soldiers ordered their dogs to urinate on him and rape him. “The dog penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten,” he said. “This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.”

In another documented case, Khaled Mahajna, an attorney with the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, described an incident where a soldier inserted the nozzle of a fire extinguisher into a Palestinian prisoner’s anus before discharging its contents, causing catastrophic internal injuries and extreme, prolonged pain. Forty-three-year-old Wajdi, another former Sde Teiman detainee, recounted a days-long campaign of abuse that began when he was shackled to a metal bed and repeatedly raped by both soldiers and a trained military dog. “I felt severe pain in my anus and screamed, but every time I screamed, I was beaten. This continued for several minutes, while soldiers filmed and mocked me,” he said. “The soldier left after ejaculating inside me. I was left in a humiliating position. I wished for death. I was bleeding.” After that first assault, Wajdi said he was untied and raped by the dog, before another soldier forced him to perform oral sex and urinated on him. The repeated assaults by multiple soldiers continued for days.

Khaled Ahmed, a field researcher for Euro-Med who conducted interviews with survivors, called Wajdi’s case uniquely devastating, noting that it accumulated “almost every form of torture, physical, psychological, and moral, layered with systematic humiliation.” “It also includes the deliberate use of multiple perpetrators and trained dogs as instruments of sexual violence,” Ahmed told Middle East Eye. “The result is not a single act of abuse, but an extended pattern of cruelty designed to destroy dignity, bodily integrity, and any sense of safety. These are acts that defy comprehension.”

Survivors consistently told researchers that the assaults were filmed and carried out in purpose-built, well-resourced institutional spaces specifically designed to enable torture and sexual violence. This structural coordination, the report argues, confirms the violence is not the work of rogue individual soldiers but an institutionalized state policy.

Ahmed acknowledged that collecting these testimonies was an emotionally grueling process. “The details the survivors described and the way they relived the emotions and events were overwhelming,” he said. Many interviewees broke down into uncontrollable crying fits while recounting their experiences, and a large number of potential survivors declined to speak publicly due to fear of reprisal from Israeli authorities and deep-seated social stigma around sexual violence in Palestinian conservative society. “But what we noticed was that all of them spoke about what happened as if they were seeing it in front of them,” Ahmed said. “They remembered every detail, as though the scene had been etched into their memory and could never leave it.”

Ahmed added that the vast majority of survivors who agreed to speak with researchers were men, as women face far more severe social stigma for sexual assault, making it nearly impossible for them or their families to disclose abuse. Researchers also documented that women’s bodies are frequently weaponized to blackmail male relatives: the report includes multiple cases of sexual assault against women who have family ties to Palestinians labeled as “wanted” by Israeli authorities.

Euro-Med Monitor’s final conclusion is unambiguous: the hundreds of testimonies collected do not reflect isolated incidents of abuse, but concrete evidence of a deliberate policy supported by Israel’s most senior civilian and military leaders, either through explicit orders or tacit approval, enabled by a broader culture of complete impunity for perpetrators.

The report explains that this scale of systematic abuse has only been made possible through Israeli legislation, military directives and emergency regulations that strip detainees of all legal protections. The 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law, for example, vastly expanded Israeli military detention powers without requiring any judicial oversight, effectively removing all legal safeguards for detainees. In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, these legal frameworks have accelerated enforced disappearances of Palestinian detainees and turned Israeli detention centers into unaccountable “black holes” where human rights abuses thrive with no outside oversight. Sde Teiman, where multiple independent investigations have already documented routine torture, rape and murder, is the most prominent example of this system, as the International Committee of the Red Cross and legal representation for detainees are routinely denied access to the facility.

The report also stresses that institutional responsibility extends far beyond the soldiers who directly carry out the abuse. Medical personnel and the Israeli judicial system actively collude to cover up crimes and shield perpetrators, the investigation finds. Doctors reportedly help obscure evidence of torture by hiding injuries in official medical records, concealing perpetrators’ identities, and issuing “fit for interrogation” certificates that clear the way for further abuse. Meanwhile, the Israeli judicial system has repeatedly protected abusers by suppressing victim and witness evidence, downgrading serious felony charges to minor offenses, and dismissing cases entirely. Most notably, in March 2024, the Israeli military dropped all charges against five soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, despite leaked CCTV footage that showed soldiers surrounding the detainee and pinning him against a wall during the alleged assault.

The authors of the report argue that these widespread abuses violate the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The abuse causes severe, lasting harm to individual detainees and members of the Palestinian community, and is intentionally aimed at preventing births within the Palestinian group, all as part of a broader goal of destroying the Palestinian community in Gaza partially or fully. The report reaffirms that legal and moral responsibility for these crimes extends to Israeli leadership and state institutions that shelter perpetrators, not just the individual soldiers who carry out the assaults.

This new investigation is not the first to document widespread sexual violence against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. Multiple independent rights groups and news organizations, including Middle East Eye, have published extensive investigations confirming the scale of the abuse. A recent United Nations inquiry went as far as accusing Israel of using sexualized torture and rape as “a method of war… to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people.”

Ahmed explained that the systematic use of sexual violence serves a deliberate, long-term strategic purpose for Israeli authorities. “It keeps the victim trapped in a cycle of violence, unable to escape it, even after the violence has practically stopped,” he said. “It continues to accompany the victim throughout their life. The survivor keeps experiencing both physical and psychological pain, and in many cases feelings of shame, humiliation, self-blame, inferiority, loss of dignity, and a lack of safety.”

The trauma does not end with the survivor, he added: it ripples outward to damage entire families and communities. “Especially in a conservative society where anything related to sexual assault is seen as an attack on the dignity of the entire family,” Ahmed said. “It is a complex crime that deeply impacts and fractures the very fabric of society.”