Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries’ Desalinated Water Supplies

Commentary by David Michel

Published March 19, 2026

The economies of the Persian Gulf countries depend on oil and natural gas. Their populations depend on desalinated water. Nature endows the Arabian Peninsula with scant freshwater resources. Consequently, all of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations lining the Gulf's southern shores critically rely on desalination plants drawing seawater from the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. The war on Iran that began on February 28 puts these essential water systems at risk. Desalination facilities in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suffered indirect damage from missile and drone strikes early in the conflict. Subsequently, plants in Bahrain and Iran have reportedly been intentionally attacked. Deliberate targeting of desalination infrastructure would represent a significant conflict escalation, potentially threatening vital water supplies for millions of people across the region.

Petrostates and Saltwater Kingdoms

The Middle East is one of the most arid regions on Earth. Across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula, not a single permanent river flows. Only Oman and Yemen enjoy a handful of small, often brackish, natural lakes. For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m³) a year-less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.

Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m³ of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations' water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry. Below that threshold, "water stress" emerges, and competition for water resources may begin to impact countries' social welfare. By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit "absolute water scarcity." According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 286 m³ per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources; Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m³ per capita per year; Qatar has 20 m³ per capita per year; while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m³ and 4 m³, respectively.

But technology and geology have given the GCC countries an alternative means to meet their freshwater needs. Hydrocarbon riches have provided these nations with the financial and energy resources needed to develop desalination systems capable of supplying their growing economies and populations. While the first saltwater "distillation" efforts in Saudi Arabia date to the early twentieth century, Gulf desalination capacity accelerated exponentially in the wake of the 1970s oil crises. From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m³. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide. Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m³ of desalinated water each day-enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools-representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity. The "petrostates" have become "saltwater kingdoms."

A Strategic Vulnerability

For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure. Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively. Cities such as Doha, Dubai, Manama, and Kuwait City would not be possible without desalination. Qatar and Bahrain, in particular, also rely heavily on desalination for industry, too, devoting over half their desalinated water production to sectors such as petrochemicals and data centers. Damage or disruptions to the region's desalination infrastructure could compromise crucial water resources for business, industry, and thousands or even millions of people across the Persian Gulf.

Concerns for the security of Gulf desalination systems rose from the outset of the Iran war. Within the first days of the conflict, reports circulated that the Fujairah F1 power and water complex in the UAE and the Doha West power and water station in Kuwait had been damaged by missiles or falling debris from intercepted drones, though operations continued uninterrupted at both facilities. Then on March 7, Iran accused the United States of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Claiming the strike impacted water supplies to 30 villages, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned, "the U.S. set this precedent, not Iran." The following day, the Bahraini Ministry of Interior alleged that an Iranian drone had hit one of the country's desalination centers, but without affecting water supplies.

Though the war in the Persian Gulf has not so far materially disrupted the region's water supplies, the prospective risks are real. The GCC's desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic, they are as exposed to Iranian weaponry as any of the civilian infrastructure that has yet been targeted, from oil and gas terminals to airports and hotels. Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely, potentially requiring weeks to repair.

By the same token, the GCC's desalination infrastructure is susceptible to multiple vulnerabilities, from its energy and seawater supplies to its distribution networks and operating systems. Desalination is an energy-intensive process, for example. Due to that energy need, some three-quarters of desalination plants in the GCC countries are integrated power and water production facilities. Freshwater output from these installations could thus be interrupted not only by strikes on the water treatment units but also on the energy plants and grid connections supplying them. Cut the water by cutting the power. Similarly, water produced by central desalination plants must then be distributed to consumers. Iran might attempt to degrade GCC water systems by targeting the pumping stations and pipelines that deliver desalinated water to users.

On a different register, Gulf desalination plants require a continuous supply of incoming seawater. Iran might seek to incapacitate GCC water systems by blocking or fouling their saltwater intakes in the Persian Gulf. This scenario has unfolded before. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait's desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population. The Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) technologies predominating today's desalination plants could be markedly more vulnerable to clogged intakes and fouled filtration membranes than the thermal processes common in the 1990s. Tellingly, in 2008-2009, a massive "red tide" algal bloom shut down several installations in Oman and the UAE for up to two months due to this risk.

Finally, industry analysts judge that GCC desalination plants could face Iranian cyber threats. Attackers might penetrate water providers' IT networks, for instance, or compromise their operating technologies or industrial control systems. Iran has actively targeted water sector infrastructure, utilities, and energy systems around the GCC (as well as in the U.S. and Israel) for many years, and Tehran has already launched aggressive cyber retaliation operations in the current conflict.

Weaponizing Water

Deliberately striking at the Gulf's vital desalination systems would represent a significant escalation in hostilities. Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as . . . drinking water installations and supplies." Targeting such essential civilian infrastructure violates international law and could constitute a war crime.

Yet Iran might come to calculate that threatening GCC water supplies could provide an effective asymmetric strategy for waging an existential struggle for regime survival. Iran can neither defeat the United States and Israel militarily nor prevent them from striking Iranian territory at will. Instead, Tehran has embarked on a campaign of both "horizontal" and "vertical" escalation. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, throttling global energy and fertilizer markets, and unleashing missile and drone barrages at soft targets in the GCC and other countries all serve to widen the war's scope and raise its stakes, increasing the costs of continuing conflict for governments, economies, and publics far beyond the Persian Gulf. The goal is not military victory but strategic leverage in a war of political attrition in which Iran believes it can outlast the United States. So far, the GCC states have not been direct combatants in this fight and have not taken offensive actions against Iran. Targeting their water sources could change that. But Iran might gamble that attacking critical water infrastructure could alternatively (or simultaneously) work to drive wedges between the Gulf governments that Tehran views as helping enable the conflict and the U.S. and Israeli governments prosecuting it, while also heightening pressures on GCC capitals to seek an end to a war they did not choose.

Whether deliberate Iranian attacks would succeed in substantially compromising GCC water supplies remains an open question. Desalination systems are widely distributed, with each country maintaining dozens to hundreds of installations. Damages even to multiple facilities could likely be largely compensated by production from others. Yet within these dispersed supply networks, each country also operates a number of mega complexes, some serving a million people or more. Successful attacks on these hubs could be far more disruptive. Likewise, missile and drone strikes pose the greatest threat to individual plants. Major weaponized oil spills, however, could potentially cripple whole city systems for hundreds of miles around. Without greater (unlikely) knowledge of remaining Iranian capacities and actual GCC vulnerabilities, the effective impacts from cyber risks can only be speculative. Extreme scenarios of concerted attacks integrating all three tactics-drones, oil, and cyberwarfare-while improbable, should not be dismissed as unimaginable.

Importantly, though the GCC countries have developed considerable production capacity for desalinated water, they have not, for the most part, established corresponding capacity for stockpiling against supply disruptions. The UAE, for instance, in 2017 unveiled its 2036 Water Security Strategy to increase water efficiency and boost national water storage. But realizing the initiative's goal would provide water stores for only two days of national demand under normal conditions, potentially lasting up to 16-45 days under rationing for extreme emergency. Saudi Arabia, too, has created strategic reservoirs furnishing modest water reserves. But Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar possess insufficient storage capacity to buffer significant supply interruptions.

Wells of Anxiety

The ultimate ramifications of any Iranian attacks on GCC desalination systems would depend upon the specific circumstances. Which country or countries are targeted? Which plant(s) are struck? What is the nature and extent of the damages and the duration of the resulting disruption? The most important effects could well be psychological. The GCC countries have devoted decades to cultivating a business model premised on their reputation as islands of prosperity and stability even in seas of geopolitical turmoil. Iran's continuing coercive capacity to precipitate potential water crises across the GCC prospectively casts this premise into question. "The real weapon is not the drone," in the words of one analyst, "it is the insurance cancellation, the rerouted tanker, and the investor who pauses." For insurers, investors-and inhabitants-potentially forced to envisage relying on tankers and trucks to bring vital water for their homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses, confidence in the continuing security of that business model could dry up long before the last water from their taps.

More than 40 years ago, a classified CIA analysis, made public in 2010, called out the security vulnerabilities created by the Gulf countries' dependence on desalination. The current conflict reveals with force that the dependence has deepened and the vulnerabilities remain. When the guns fall silent, GCC conceptions of their water security and of their national security will likely stand transformed.

David Michel is a senior associate (non-resident) for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2026 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

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