标签： Asia

A highly confidential gathering of top military commanders from the United States, Israel, and multiple Arab nations took place in Germany last week to coordinate strategy around the ongoing Israel-US military campaign against Iran, details of which have been disclosed by anonymous Israeli sources to journalists. The exclusive report, published by Axios and written by Barak Ravid — a former Israeli intelligence officer who now works as a political and security correspondent — reveals that the closed-door “private retreat” was arranged personally by Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

According to two unnamed Israeli officials interviewed by Ravid, the meeting included the highest-ranking military chiefs of staff from eight nations: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. This gathering marks the first formal collective meeting of these military leaders since the Israel-US war against Iran began more than six months ago.

While none of the participating regional nations have issued any public confirmation of the meeting, Centcom has released an official, albeit vague, acknowledgment of the event. In a short public statement, the command confirmed it “hosted senior military leaders from eight nations during a scheduled conference in Germany” and added that attendees “discussed opportunities for enhancing security cooperation in the Middle East.”

Beyond the broad public confirmation, leaked details from the closed-door sessions indicate that Admiral Cooper used the meeting to deliver a key reassurance to regional partner nations. Despite repeated large-scale Iranian strikes on U.S. military installations across the Middle East that have caused extensive damage, Cooper stated that Washington has no intention of withdrawing its military forces from the region.

Verified open-source satellite analysis conducted by *The Washington Post* has confirmed that Iranian attacks have left their mark on at least 15 separate U.S. military sites spread across the region, including bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan. Hundreds of structures and pieces of military hardware have been destroyed or damaged, with many bases rendered functionally unusable. The most severe impact has been felt at the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, where extensive damage forced Centcom to reroute all regional logistics operations to alternate sites.

In addition to addressing force posture, Cooper also outlined U.S. plans to increase commercial and military ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil and gas trade that has become a major flashpoint in tensions with Iran.

For his part, Israeli Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamir used the gathering to give attendees a full briefing on ongoing Israeli military operations across the Middle East, per one Israeli official quoted in the Axios report. A key structural change also followed the meeting: Israel was officially transferred from the U.S. European Command’s area of responsibility to Centcom, a shift that opens the door to far more direct military cooperation between Israel and the participating Arab states under the U.S. military command structure.

Not all regional and security observers view the new alignment and Admiral Cooper’s leadership positively, however. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London who specializes in Middle East security, noted that there is widespread underlying distrust of Cooper among Gulf Arab governments. Krieg argued that regional capitals see Cooper as excessively aligned with Israel, overly hawkish toward Iran, and prone to pushing military operational options that carry high risks of strategic disaster for the region.

A long-running campaign targeting international humanitarian medical organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) has escalated dramatically, with British pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) formally calling on the British government to designate the Gaza-operating charity as a terrorist organization.

The push from UKLFI is rooted in a recent report claiming unproven links between MSF employees and Palestinian militant groups, allegations that MSF has forcefully and repeatedly rejected. The core of the claims centers on Fadi Jihad Mohammed al-Wadiya, a physiotherapist on MSF’s payroll who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on June 25, 2024. Israeli officials immediately asserted al-Wadiya was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an armed Palestinian group.

MSF pushed back on the claim within months of the strike, stating in February that it had found no evidence of any military affiliation by al-Wadiya before his death at the hands of Israeli forces. In an official statement responding to UKLFI’s latest demand last week, the charity doubled down on its denial. “MSF unequivocally refutes the allegations made by the Israeli authorities that we knowingly hired people with ‘ties to terrorism’,” the organization said. “MSF would never knowingly employ anyone involved in military activities, which contradicts our core values and ethics.”

MSF further noted that Israeli authorities have only made claims of militant links against its staff after those employees have already been killed, with no advance warning or evidence shared while they were alive. “If Israeli authorities had reliable information about any MSF staff involvement in military activity, they never shared it with us before their deaths,” the statement added. The charity also confirmed it has been the target of a sustained disinformation campaign for months, and strongly condemned the deliberate spread of false accusations against its team.

The tensions come amid a string of recent attacks on MSF operations in Gaza: just this week, an Israeli airstrike damaged an MSF-owned bus carrying 10 humanitarian workers in Gaza City, adding to a long list of incidents that have threatened aid workers delivering critical care to the besieged enclave.

Financial records show MSF’s UK branch raised £11.3 million in 2023 specifically for its humanitarian work in occupied Palestine. In defending its demand for a ban, a UKLFI spokesperson argued that British donors deserve full transparency and rigorous vetting for any funds sent to Hamas-controlled Gaza. “The evidence we have assembled raises serious questions about people employed by MSF, the organisations with which it works and whether adequate safeguards have been put in place to ensure that charitable resources cannot be exploited by terrorist organisations,” the spokesperson said.

The UK’s Charity Commission confirmed last week it is now actively reviewing the concerns raised by UKLFI to determine what action, if any, it will take next. The current allegations are not new: they can be traced back to claims from the Israeli government earlier this year that two MSF employees held ties to Hamas and PIJ, another accusation MSF has emphatically denied. In February, Israel moved to ban MSF from operating in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank after the organization refused to turn over a full list of its Palestinian and international staff. MSF said it could not share the data because it could not secure guaranteed assurances that the information would be protected and not misused.

This is part of a broader pattern: the Israeli government has repeatedly accused international and local aid groups operating in Gaza of ties to Hamas in recent years. Earlier this year, Israel imposed bans on dozens of aid groups working in the enclave, a move that human rights organizations have warned has severely restricted already fragile humanitarian access to Gaza, where more than two million people face widespread food insecurity and collapsing medical infrastructure.

Founded in 2011, UKLFI has established itself as a leading British advocacy group focused on pressuring and discrediting UK-based individuals and organizations that criticize Israeli government policy, as well as humanitarian groups that provide aid to Palestinians. The group is prominently featured in the European Legal Support Centre’s Britain Index of Repression, a database that documents what the center calls systematic repression of pro-Palestine solidarity activism across the United Kingdom. UKLFI is listed 128 times in the database, and the center found that the group has contributed to a “chilling environment” that pushes people and organizations to pull back from or alter fully lawful pro-Palestine activity out of fear of legal action. The center’s analysis also shows UKLFI frequently acts as an initiating or escalating actor against pro-Palestinian solidarity work, often using formal complaint letters, legal threats, and public pressure to push schools, universities, employers, and public institutions to launch disciplinary investigations or cancel planned events related to Palestine.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has made a landmark call for the international arrest of 87 senior Iranian officials, accusing them of direct involvement in crimes against humanity carried out during the brutal state crackdown on the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The demand is anchored in a sprawling 1,000-plus-page investigative report, titled *Architects of Atrocities: State Machinery Orchestrating Crimes Against Humanity in Iran’s 2022 Woman Life Freedom Uprising*, which lays bare the full scale of systematic repression deployed by Tehran to crush the mass anti-government movement. The 2022 nationwide protests were ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict mandatory hijab regulations. In the months of unrest and state-led retaliation that followed, hundreds of protesters and bystanders lost their lives.

After years of meticulous evidence-gathering, Amnesty’s investigation has verified the deaths of 377 civilians caught up in the crackdown, 56 of whom were children. Disproportionately, the victims came from Iran’s marginalized Kurdish and Baloch ethnic minority communities, groups that have long faced systemic discrimination under the Islamic Republic. “Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity, against protesters demanding dignity, human rights and fundamental political change,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, told reporters at the report’s official launch press conference on Wednesday.

Callamard detailed the full scope of state abuses, confirming that Iranian security and political institutions carried out deliberate crimes against humanity including extrajudicial murder, widespread torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary mass imprisonment, sexual violence including rape, and targeted persecution on the basis of political belief, gender identity, ethnicity, and religion—all in a coordinated campaign to annihilate the uprising. The rights group is pushing for two key international actions to deliver accountability: first, it calls on the United Nations General Assembly to create a dedicated international criminal justice mechanism that can investigate crimes, prosecute perpetrators, and deter future repressive crackdowns on dissent. Second, it demands the UN Security Council refer the entire situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor for formal investigation.

Joining Callamard at the press conference was Mahsa Piraei, an Iranian activist whose mother was shot and killed by security forces during protests in the western city of Kermanshah. Piraei emphasized that accountability cannot stop at low-level officers who carried out violence, arguing that blame extends all the way up Iran’s chain of command. “The person who fired the shot that killed my mother must be held accountable, but it must not stop there,” she said. “My mother was not killed by the actions of just one person – she was killed by a system.”

In a striking rebuke of outside military intervention, Callamard also warned that ongoing unlawful military attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel are severely undermining global efforts to secure justice for victims of the 2022 crackdown, and called for an immediate enduring ceasefire across Iranian territory. Since the US-Israeli military campaign launched in February, at least 3,600 Iranians—including both senior government officials and civilian non-combatants—have been killed. The US has publicly justified its military assault by pointing to a separate January 2025 crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, where Iranian security forces killed thousands of protesters within days.

But rights groups have documented that the US-Israeli war has also killed and wounded Iranian dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic, including political prisoners held in jails located in strategically targeted areas. In response to the external invasion, the Iranian government has also sharply ramped up internal repression against domestic dissent. Six of the 87 officials named in Amnesty’s report have already been killed in targeted strikes during the war, while other senior figures implicated in the 2022 crackdown—including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps chief Ahmad Vahidi—have received promotions within the Iranian government.

Callamard made clear that Amnesty opposes both the targeted killing of Iranian officials and the efforts by Washington and Tel Aviv to instrumentalize documented human rights abuses in Iran to justify their full-scale military assault. “No matter how complex the panorama is…we want to insist that international law should guide the path of action right now,” she said. “A principled response required rejecting both unlawful military attacks and impunity for crimes against humanity.”

Perched on a strategic hilltop just outside Israel’s self-declared Yellow Line in south Lebanon, the small village of Ghandouriyeh bears the brutal, visible scars of months of cross-border conflict. Most of its residential buildings stand as hollowed rubble or flattened heaps of concrete, the result of Israeli strikes earlier this year that turned once-lived-in homes into uninhabitable wreckage. It is here that 66-year-old Mariam Ismail Ballout waited on August 28 at the entrance of a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) mobile medical clinic, desperate to collect medication and escape the chaos that has upended her life.

“All our houses are ruined, all our houses are on the ground, demolished,” Ballout told Middle East Eye, her voice cracking before tears overtook her. She lost everything when her home burned to the ground: no refrigerator, no washing machine, no access to gas for cooking—every basic necessity of daily life gone overnight.

Ghandouriyeh sits just south of Froun, one of Lebanon’s designated “pilot zones” in the Nabatieh governorate, a region that has remained on edge despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced in June. A rolling green valley called Wadi al-Hujeir blocks direct sightlines to Israeli military positions on the other side of the border, but little else shields residents from the constant threat of violence. A large plastic bin marked with an Arabic warning of “enemy” territory beyond is the only barrier between the village outskirts and roads now closed to all travel.

Against all advice, roughly 228 families have returned to Ghandouriyeh in recent months, even though the village has no access to running water or electricity. Village mayor Mohammed Ali Nader told Middle East Eye that most returnees have no other option: they cannot afford to rent housing elsewhere, forcing them to cram into damaged, partially standing homes and share space with neighbors who have also lost everything. While Nader confirmed the village has not suffered a direct strike in months, residents live in a permanent state of high alert—a chronic stress that medical experts say is fueling a growing, underreported mental health crisis across the region.

MSF, which operates daily mobile medical units across hard-to-reach parts of south Lebanon, has become a critical lifeline for communities cut off from regular healthcare access. Almas Al Andary, a 33-year-old MSF counselor and clinical psychologist working out of the Ghandouriyeh clinic, says the conflict has triggered new mental health disorders among people who never experienced symptoms before. “We definitely see a lot of people having acute stress disorders. And these symptoms we can’t formally diagnose because the crisis is still ongoing,” Al Andary explained. Intense, persistent responses to daily triggers—including the constant buzzing of Israeli drones that hover over the village nearly every day—are the most common complaints: widespread tension, hypervigilance, crippling fear, and constant anxiety about the next strike.

MSF’s internal records reflect the scale of the growing need: since the war resumed on March 2, the organization’s counselors have conducted 1,326 individual mental health sessions across southern Lebanon, and requests for psychological support have climbed steadily month over month. On the day of Middle East Eye’s visit to Ghandouriyeh, the persistent hum of an Israeli drone hung over the village. Only three patients came to the clinic that day—an unusually low number, which Al Andary attributed to overnight air strikes that sent most residents fleeing to the relative safety of the valley overnight. Of the three patients that did show up, two were first-time visitors seeking mental health support.

The crisis extends far beyond Ghandouriyeh. Earlier this year, Embrace, a leading Lebanese mental health non-profit that runs the country’s National Lifeline, reported that call volume during the 2026 conflict was 55 percent higher than during the 2024 cross-border war. Despite this surge, little public data exists to document the full scope of mental health harm in southern Lebanon under the fragile, nominally ceasefire conditions. On the ground, frontline medics say the reality is stark. Farah Kerbaj, a community health educator, told Middle East Eye that widespread sleep disorders are rampant, forcing many residents to rely on sleep and mental health medications just to get through the day. Reem Farhat, an MSF midwife working in the region, added that most patients she sees are in a state of constant agitation, their nerves frayed by months of uncertainty.

Stigma around mental health treatment and the chaos of tracking care for displaced families have only compounded the crisis, medics say. For Ghandouriyeh, the most urgent immediate need is access to clean water—without it, residents cannot grow crops to feed their families, the mayor says. But even the most basic calm remains out of reach: most families keep their bags packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, a constant state of readiness that aligns with the hypervigilance Al Andary documents in her patients.

“We’re fed up, honestly. We’re fed up with wars; we’ve had enough wars,” said Mohammed Gannem, a local resident who returned to Ghandouriyeh with his family in June, relieved to find his home still standing but still unable to sleep through the night. Gannem says he is particularly worried about the impact of constant conflict on his two young daughters; his youngest, nearly two years old, now flinches in terror at the sound of incoming shelling, a fear she never had before this year’s war.

Medics say the steady rise in demand for mental health support has two overlapping causes: a growing willingness among Lebanese people to seek help for mental health struggles, as historical stigma slowly fades, and a parallel rise in desperation as the ceasefire holds in name only. Israel continues to carry out strikes beyond the Yellow Line in Nabatieh, Tyre, and other southern districts, which have claimed dozens of lives since the June truce. The Lebanese Army confirmed last week it has ramped up operations in southern non-occupied areas amid growing signs of escalating tensions.

Georges Jreij, an MSF counselor based at another mobile clinic in Beirut’s southern suburbs, says mental health distress often rises in waves following the outbreak of conflict, with a predictable surge around the six-month mark— a threshold the war will hit this month. “It’s usually the time it takes for the brain to really realise the situation, to be able to think about the stuff that people are going through,” Jreij explained. “And the central nervous system sort of calms down in these periods, so other sides of the brain are reactivated.”

As the MSF clinic’s day in Ghandouriyeh drew to a close, a brief, unexpected sound cut through the constant drone buzz: the playful jingle of a pale pink ice cream van, its windscreen cracked from past strikes, slowly winding past the piles of ruined homes. For a moment, the sound offered a faint, fleeting echo of normal life in the hilltop village. But as the jingle faded into the distance, the menacing buzz of surveillance drones returned, a constant reminder that for the residents of south Lebanon, the crisis is far from over.

In the early hours of Wednesday, a six-story residential building that had sustained previous damage from Israeli military strikes in western Gaza City collapsed suddenly, leaving at least 14 people dead and dozens more — including many children — trapped under tons of rubble. The catastrophe unfolded while most residents inside were asleep, according to local emergency officials.

The building, located on al-Sinaa Street, was home to more than 10 extended families totaling approximately 80 people, a large share of whom were children. As of Wednesday afternoon, Gaza’s Civil Defence, the territory’s official emergency and rescue agency, confirmed that 14 bodies had been recovered from the site, including five children, while 10 injured survivors have been pulled out and transported to local medical facilities.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence, told reporters that rescue teams can still hear the cries of trapped people calling for help from beneath the debris, and crews are working around the clock to reach them. Abdullah al-Majdalawi, the agency’s director of public relations and media, added that operations have continued nonstop since the collapse was reported at roughly 3:10 a.m. local time. “Every victim we have pulled from beneath the rubble appears to have been sleeping on a mattress. They were asleep when the building collapsed,” Majdalawi explained to Middle East Eye in an on-site interview.

Critical equipment shortages have severely hampered rescue efforts, however. Years of Israeli military operations have destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s heavy rescue machinery, leaving crews without the tools needed to clear large sections of reinforced concrete quickly. “We lack even the most basic tools,” Majdalawi said. “In the first moments after the collapse, we had to ask neighbours and displaced people nearby to bring hammers, shovels and other tools because of the severe shortage of equipment.”

Witnesses who live in the surrounding area described the collapse as sudden and devastating. Talal al-Harazin, a 53-year-old displaced Palestinian who lives in a makeshift tent near the building, said the sudden collapse felt like an earthquake. “It took less than 10 seconds for the entire building to come down,” he recalled. Al-Harazin added that the building had been visibly unstable for weeks: it had already sunk roughly three floors after an earlier Israeli strike, and debris fell from its damaged facade daily. “Unfortunately, we expected it to collapse. People had warned them, but they said, ‘Where can we live?’” he said. “Just yesterday, stones fell from it, and we said it could collapse. And that same night, it collapsed.”

Sabreen Nassir, a 33-year-old displaced woman who also lives in a nearby encampment, said two of her daughters’ close friends remain trapped under the rubble. “My daughters are standing here, watching and waiting for their friends to be pulled out,” Nassir said, noting her family has lived near the building for seven months as displaced people.

This disaster is not an isolated incident, according to Civil Defence officials. An estimated 2,000 damaged buildings across the Gaza Strip are currently at high risk of sudden collapse after sustaining damage from Israeli strikes, and the vast majority of these structures remain occupied because residents have no alternative shelter. “This is a recurring situation. Buildings at risk of collapse are becoming graves for their residents. The only difference is the timing,” Majdalawi warned. “Dozens of homes have collapsed, and dozens of people have been killed in this way.”

Officials are also sounding the alarm about growing risks as the winter season approaches. Without a massive influx of temporary shelter units and reconstruction materials, far more deadly disasters are on the horizon, Majdalawi said. “We are now on the verge of a real disaster as winter approaches. If mobile homes, caravans and reconstruction materials are not brought into Gaza, we will see more of these disasters.”

The ongoing shelter crisis in Gaza stems from the widespread destruction of housing during Israel’s military campaign that began in 2023. UN data estimates that roughly 90 percent of all housing units across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, leaving nearly all of the territory’s 2.2 million residents internally displaced. A report released last month by the Shelter Cluster, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, found that 1.98 million Palestinians — 94 percent of Gaza’s total population — require urgent shelter assistance and basic household supplies.

A US-mediated ceasefire agreement reached in October last year was meant to end hostilities, open Gaza’s borders to large-scale humanitarian aid including construction and shelter materials, and launch formal reconstruction efforts. But Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the truce, carrying out near-daily military operations across the territory, restricting access for reconstruction teams, and blocking the entry of most critical aid supplies, including materials needed to repair or replace damaged housing.

Tensions between the United States and Iran have settled into a dangerous stalemate in the Persian Gulf, with escalating tit-for-tat threats to maritime traffic that have now spread to a little-discussed but globally critical piece of infrastructure: the region’s network of undersea communications cables.

The long-running standoff has already reshaped activity in the Gulf: the U.S. Navy enforces a blockade blocking commercial vessels from entering or exiting Iranian ports, while Tehran has responded by threatening the freedom of navigation for all shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies transit daily. Most recently, Iran has announced plans to establish a new restricted military zone extending from the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf proper, though concrete details of the zone’s boundaries and rules remain undisclosed.

What has flown largely under the public radar, however, is the sprawling web of undersea fiber-optic cables crisscrossing the Gulf that connect the Middle East to the rest of the global digital economy. On August 16, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian authorities are actively considering targeted strikes against this critical undersea infrastructure (CUI). In the Gulf’s shallow waters, this threat is not a hypothetical risk—it is a credible danger that threatens Gulf economies and reverberates across the entire globe.

These largely unseen cables form the backbone of the world’s connected economy, carrying more than 95% of all international data traffic. Their function far outpaces basic consumer internet access and phone calls: they underpin trillions of dollars in daily global financial transactions, secure government communications, and support the data-heavy operations of the global technology sector. As demand for artificial intelligence has skyrocketed in recent years, tech giants including Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions of dollars into expanding subsea cable networks to connect their sprawling global data center ecosystems, making these infrastructure assets more strategically important than ever.

For Gulf Cooperation Council states, this threat hits particularly close to home. Many of these nations have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to developing domestic AI sectors as part of sweeping plans to diversify their economies away from reliance on fossil fuel exports. Disruption to the Gulf’s undersea cables would not just interrupt internet service—it would directly undermine a core pillar of their long-term economic transformation goals.

Four major cable networks currently route traffic through the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, making the region an irreplaceable global digital chokepoint. These include the Fibre in Gulf system, which connects Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; the Falcon Network, which links 12 nations across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa; the Asia-Africa-Europe1 (AEE1) network, which connects Southeast Asia to Europe via Gulf landing points in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE; and Gulf Bridge International, which connects eight regional states and extends onward to India and Europe. What was once purely a strategic chokepoint for oil and gas trade has now taken on new importance as a bottleneck for global digital connectivity.

Two unique geographic and operational factors make the Gulf’s CUI uniquely vulnerable to attack. First, the entire region has extremely shallow waters: the Persian Gulf has an average depth of just 50 meters, with a maximum depth of less than 100 meters. This means attacking the cables does not require the advanced deep-sea capabilities maintained by specialized state units like Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research (GUGI), the Kremlin’s underwater sabotage and espionage force.

Off-the-shelf, commercially available technology common to the region’s massive oil and gas industry can easily be repurposed for offensive operations. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) capable of operating at thousands of meters below sea level are widespread in the offshore energy sector, and the number of similarly capable autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating in the region has grown dramatically in recent years. Iran has already publicly unveiled its own domestically built mine-clearing ROV, and defense analysts assume it holds additional unpublicized underwater capabilities. The shallow depth also means the entire cable network is well within the operating range of conventional military divers. Even less sophisticated tactics, such as a commercial ship “accidentally” dragging its anchor across a cable route—an incident that has already occurred in the Baltic Sea—could cause major outages.

The feasibility of an attack is not in question, and the threat has already had tangible consequences. Multiple planned new cable projects and expansion projects have been put on indefinite hold, after project owners and contractors concluded they cannot safely carry out installation work in the current high-risk environment. This disruption to infrastructure investment already highlights how geopolitical tension is reshaping the development of the global digital network.

John Aitken, a senior research fellow at RAND Europe and the author of the analysis, notes that Iran has almost certainly mapped the entire regional cable network and trained specialized teams to access the cables, which lie well within diver operating depths across most of the Gulf. Beyond publicly acknowledged ROVs for mine clearance, Iran’s mature offshore oil industry gives it access to a wide range of underwater assets that can be adapted for offensive operations.

The core open question remains: how far is Iran willing to go? A widespread attack on the regional cable network would cause massive disruptions to trade and digital communications across the Middle East, with immediate spillover effects for the global economy. If Tehran sought to avoid sweeping global condemnation, any attack would likely be limited and targeted. But given Iran’s increasing economic and diplomatic isolation, analysts say the regime may judge the risk acceptable to achieve its strategic goals.

This uncertainty around potential Iranian action has sparked new discussion about the need for updated deterrence frameworks for undersea infrastructure, a domain that has largely been overlooked in traditional security planning. Aitken argues the threat represents an extension of the Nixon administration’s “madman theory” of nuclear deterrence: a politically and economically isolated state may be willing to carry out extreme action in the CUI domain—action that rational observers would deem disproportionate to the stakes—to deter more conventional military attacks against its territory.

This development should not come as a surprise. Just as roads, bridges and railways became standard military targets in 20th century conflicts to disrupt an opponent’s war-fighting capacity, undersea cables are the critical infrastructure of the digital age, and they have now become a strategic target for nations in conflict.

While Iran’s exact intent to carry out attacks on the Gulf’s CUI remains unconfirmed, that very ambiguity is already reshaping investment and security planning across the region, with consequences that will be felt for global digital connectivity for years to come.