{"id":366108,"date":"2026-03-30T16:20:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T16:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/366108\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T16:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T16:20:13","slug":"airports-plants-and-ports-the-civilian-targets-increasingly-under-threat-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/366108\/","title":{"rendered":"Airports, plants and ports: The civilian targets increasingly under threat in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n One month into an expanding conflict in the Middle East, an increasing amount of civilian infrastructure is being struck \u2013 frequently by design.\n <\/p>\n

\n Factories producing steel, aluminum and chemicals; refineries; reservoirs; desalination plants; civilian airports and universities have all been hit.\n <\/p>\n

\n A few such targets might be described as underpinning a country\u2019s war machine. Last week Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned of attacks on \u201cadditional targets and areas that assist the regime in building and operating weapons against Israeli civilians.\u201d Soon afterwards, Israel stuck several steel plants.\n <\/p>\n

\n Analysts say the economic and social costs of strikes by Iran and Israel are intensifying.\n <\/p>\n

\n US strikes \u2013 so far \u2013 have tended to be more narrowly focused. But US President Donald Trump threatened Monday to \u201cconclude our lovely \u2018stay\u2019 in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!),\u201d in a post on Truth Social.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iran has repeatedly warned that as its economic and social infrastructure is attacked, it will retaliate against similar facilities in countries supporting the US-Israeli campaign, even publishing evacuation orders in some cases.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe retaliation for the attack on Iran\u2019s infrastructure is being carried out by destroying strategic industries related to the American-Zionist enemy in the region,\u201d said Brig. Gen. Majid Mousavi, aerospace commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, on Monday.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n In a region where the energy industry \u2013 oil, natural gas and petrochemicals \u2013 is the lifeblood of the economy, both Israel and Iran have targeted refineries and production sites \u2013 while the US has publicly said it is avoiding such targets.\n <\/p>\n

\n Early in the conflict, Iranian drones struck part of the huge Ras Tanura<\/a> refinery on Saudi Arabia\u2019s east coast. A similar complex at Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been repeatedly attacked.\n <\/p>\n

\n QatarEnergy declared force majeure \u2013 meaning that it could not fulfil contracts \u2013 after several Iranian strikes on Ras Laffan, one of the world\u2019s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities.\n <\/p>\n

\n Kuwaiti refineries have also been targeted: the Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery came under two waves of attacks on March 19 alone.\n <\/p>\n

\n Meanwhile an Iranian ballistic missile targeting Israel was intercepted Monday. But debris struck a refinery complex and started a fire in Haifa Bay on Monday, the second time the facility has been hit this month.\n <\/p>\n

\n Israeli attacks have included targeting massive fuel storage tanks<\/a> in Tehran on March 7, causing heavy pollution. While the Israelis said the tanks were used for military purposes, Amnesty International said \u201cthe potential for vast, predictable and devastating civilian harm caused by strikes on energy infrastructure\u201d by all sides in the conflict \u2013 \u201cmeans such attacks carry a substantial risk of violating international humanitarian law.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Ports and aluminum plants<\/p>\n

\n Iranian missiles and drones have hit ports in Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar. Tehran has also targeted Salalah and Duqm in Oman, two ports that function as partial bypass routes for the blocked Strait of Hormuz.\n <\/p>\n

\n In turn, several Iranian ports have come under attack in Hormozgan province, the region that includes the Strait of Hormuz<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n The UAE and Bahrain are important aluminium producers, and the closure of Hormuz has already led to supply shortages. On Saturday, Iranian drones and missiles struck both Aluminium Bahrain and a site belonging to Emirates Global Aluminium in Abu Dhabi, which said \u201csignificant damage\u201d was done.\n <\/p>\n

\n The price of aluminium jumped 5% in early London trading on Monday, following the attacks.\n <\/p>\n

\n Those strikes came after two major steel plants \u2013 Mobarakeh and Khuzestan \u2013 in Iran were struck. \u201cSix steel plants in Israel and in five regional countries have been declared new targets for potential retaliatory strikes by Iran,\u201d the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.\n <\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

\n Doha in Qatar and Dubai in the UAE have in recent years become two of the most important hubs in the world for international travel.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iranian drones have repeatedly but unsuccessfully targeted the airport in Doha and have caused damage at Dubai\u2019s main international airport. Extensive delays and cancellations through both hubs have taken a heavy economic toll. Qatar Airways sent several of its planes to storage in Spain as its operations were cut.\n <\/p>\n

\n Kuwait\u2019s international airport was struck on Sunday, causing a massive fire and damage to radar systems.\n <\/p>\n

\n In Iran, the main domestic airport in Tehran was hit repeatedly by Israeli strikes in mid-March \u2013 but the Israeli military said its targets were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) aircraft at the airport.\n <\/p>\n

\n In a region where fresh water is scarce, desalination plants<\/a> are as important as oil refiuneries, supplying drinking water to roughly 100 million people in the Gulf. Early in the conflict, Bahraini officials said an Iranian drone had damaged<\/a> a desalination plant, although the attack had not affected water supplies. And Iran\u2019s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed<\/a> on March 7 that the US hit a desalination plant on Iran\u2019s Qeshm Island. The US denied involvement.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iran pledged just a week ago that it would not hit Gulf desalination infrastructure. But Kuwait\u2019s Ministry of \u2060Electricity said<\/a> one worker was killed in \u2060an Iranian attack on \u2060a power and water desalination Monday. Iranian state media accused Israel of carrying out the attack.\n <\/p>\n

Assault on universities and research centers<\/p>\n

\n The Israelis have struck universities and research centers in Iran, saying they are being used for military purposes. Malek Ashtar and Imam Hossein universities have been among the targets, as was Tehran\u2019s University of Science and Technology at the weekend, according to the Fars<\/a> news agency.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iran denies military use of these sites, accusing Israel of aiming to cripple its scientific base. It has threatened to retaliate in kind.\n <\/p>\n

\n Israeli universities \u201cand American universities in the West Asia region are legitimate targets for us until two universities are struck in retaliation for the Iranian universities that have been destroyed,\u201d it said Sunday.\n <\/p>\n

\n New York University\u2019s Abu Dhabi campus sent an email to students Sunday saying it had closed \u201cout of abundance of caution.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Hospitals and other civilian infrastructure<\/p>\n

\"Debris<\/p>\n

\n Iran has said dozens of hospitals and medical facilities have been damaged during the intensive US and Israeli bombardment over the last month, the latest being a psychiatric hospital in Tehran.\n <\/p>\n

\n The World Health Organization verified 13 attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran in the early days of the campaign.\n <\/p>\n

\n While there is no evidence that medical facilities have been deliberately targeted, they are sometimes close to targets in urban areas.\n <\/p>\n

\n Similarly, a cruise missile strike targeting an IRGC base in southern Iran killed nearly 200 people, most of them children, at an adjacent school.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iran has frequently asserted it is focused on hitting US military bases in the Gulf \u2013 not the countries themselves. But it has warned that hotels housing US military personnel will also be considered targets. As the month has unfolded, an increasing number of obviously civilian facilities have been struck.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIran has targeted the region\u2019s energy and transport infrastructure, the pillars of (Gulf Cooperation Council) GCC global power; in doing so it is seeking to damage Gulf citizens\u2019, residents\u2019 and investors\u2019 confidence in these states\u2019 ability to provide security to citizens and foreign workers,\u201d says the International Institute for Strategic Studies.\n <\/p>\n

\n With the conflict now into its second month and the number of purely military targets much reduced, the economic toll is likely to rise.\n <\/p>\n

\n CNN\u2019s Eugenia Yosef and Adam Pourahmadi contributed to this report.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One month into an expanding conflict in the Middle East, an increasing amount of civilian infrastructure is being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-366108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}