Hundreds of desalination plants line the Persian Gulf, and in Monday’s threat, President Donald Trump explicitly put those water systems alongside Iran’s oil and electricity—raising the prospect of a strike category that could quickly affect civilians far beyond any battlefield.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that if a deal to end the war is not reached “shortly,” and the Strait of Hormuz is not immediately reopened, the United States would “conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran” by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island” and “possibly all desalinization plants,” which he said the U.S. had “purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
The AP reported that the warning comes as the conflict intensified, with Tehran striking a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait and an oil refinery in Israel coming under attack, while U.S. and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes on Iran. In that environment, analysts said the focus on water facilities is likely to be aimed at imposing pressure, but the path from damage to daily hardship can be nonlinear.
The core concern, analysts said, is not only what Trump’s threat could mean for Iran’s own infrastructure, but also how Tehran could respond. Iran’s water reliance on desalination is described as limited, while Gulf Arab states depend on desalination for the vast majority of their water, meaning disruptions could spread consequences across multiple cities and countries.
Desalination’s vulnerability, several experts said, is tied to how tightly it is linked to power and how its many parts work as a chain. David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems even when plants have backup supply routes. Ed Cullinane, Mideast editor at Global Water Intelligence, said desalination plants have multiple stages—intake systems, treatment facilities, and energy supplies—and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production.
Human Rights Watch researcher Niku Jafarnia said the civilian harm is the central issue. “Desalination facilities are oftentimes necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” Jafarnia said. He added that attacking water facilities “even one, could end up being harmful to the population in such a severe water scarcity context,” where the region’s baseline conditions make recovery more difficult.
Along the Gulf, desalination capacity is concentrated. The AP reported that, in Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination; about 86% in Oman; and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. That concentration is what makes individual facilities potentially high-leverage targets, and the region’s coastal geography—desalination plants sitting along the Persian Gulf—puts them within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes, the AP said.
In addition to desalination, the threat sits within a wider pattern of energy and water interdependence. The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies, and fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill. Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, described the regional dependence this way: “Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers.”
The AP also noted that U.S. and Gulf governments have long recognized the danger of attacking desalination infrastructure. A 2010 CIA analysis warned that attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states and that prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed, according to the AP. That analysis also warned that more than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water came from just 56 plants, and that each critical plant was “extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”
While some states have built redundancy—such as pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies—smaller countries such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have fewer backup supplies, the AP said. Desalination has expanded amid intensifying drought from climate change, and the plants are described as highly energy-intensive and exposed to coastal risks, making civilian-water systems both crucial and fragile during war.
Past conflicts in the region show how quickly the loss of water infrastructure can become a prolonged civilian emergency. Low said that during Iraq’s 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait, retreating Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities, and that workers rushed to deploy protective booms around intake valves; Kuwait was left largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports, with full recovery taking years. In more recent years, the AP reported that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities as tensions escalated.
The AP reported that international humanitarian law, including provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prohibits targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities—an assertion that Jafarnia tied directly to the specific category of desalination destruction mentioned in Trump’s threat.