A high-ranking member of the Saudi royal family has publicly confirmed that the Gulf kingdom has deliberately rejected falling into an Israeli scheme designed to spark a catastrophic full-scale war between Riyadh and Tehran. Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former longtime intelligence chief who led Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency for more than 20 years and the son of the kingdom’s former ruler King Faisal, laid out this position in an opinion piece published over the weekend in Arab News, a major Saudi-owned regional publication.
In the commentary, Prince Turki emphasized that under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, the kingdom has prioritized diplomatic de-escalation to resolve a conflict Riyadh sought to prevent from its outset. He detailed that when regional actors including Iran pushed to draw Saudi Arabia into what he called a “furnace of destruction,” the kingdom’s leadership chose to absorb the harm caused by regional tensions to safeguard its citizens’ lives and property.
The former intelligence head acknowledged that if Saudi leadership had opted to launch retaliatory strikes against Iranian infrastructure and interests, it had the capability to carry out such attacks. However, he warned that any military response would have had devastating consequences, triggering further attacks on critical Saudi assets including vital oil production facilities and the kingdom’s strategic desalination plants that supply the arid nation with drinking water.
“Had the Israeli plan to ignite war between us and Iran succeeded, the region would have been plunged into ruin and destruction,” Prince Turki wrote in the piece. “Thousands of our sons and daughters would have been lost in a battle in which we had no stake. Israel would have succeeded in imposing its will on the region and remained the only unchecked actor in our surroundings.”
He added that Saudi Arabia is currently working alongside Pakistan to head off additional regional escalation and prevent tensions from spiraling out of control. In a sharp rebuke to proponents of military action, he noted that “As for the advocates of war, they continue in their arrogance and cawing, perhaps unaware that the rug has been pulled from under their feet.”
Prince Turki’s comments come amid a sharply escalated regional crisis that unfolded after the U.S. and Israel launched military operations against Iran on February 28. In retaliation, Iran carried out strikes against every Gulf state that hosts U.S. military bases, including Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has also suffered major economic and strategic disruption from Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital maritime chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily crude oil shipments pass.
Last month, Saudi Arabia officially announced that attacks on its key East-West Pipeline had cut 700,000 barrels per day of the kingdom’s production capacity, equal to approximately 10 percent of its current total oil exports. The pipeline is a critical strategic asset that allows Saudi Arabia to ship oil from its Gulf coast fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing the closed Strait of Hormuz entirely.
Beyond pipeline infrastructure, Iranian strikes have also targeted key refining facilities in major Saudi energy hubs including Jubail, Ras Tanura, Yanbu, and the capital Riyadh. These attacks have directly disrupted the kingdom’s exports of refined petroleum products to global consumer markets, adding additional strain to already volatile global energy supplies.