Verity Bowman

Donald Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s water infrastructure – an act experts say would constitute a war crime that could plunge tens of millions of people into crisis.

If the Strait of Hormuz is not opened “immediately,” the United States “will 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 desalination plants,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

Over the last five weeks, strikes have already hit desalination facilities in Iran, Bahrain and Kuwait, killing at least one worker and forcing Iranian authorities to truck water by tanker to some villages left without supply.

Experts have warned that the US president’s threats, along with the recent attacks, risk escalating the conflict into a water war across the Gulf – with catastrophic consequences.

“Water supply is the Gulf region’s Achilles heel,” said Dr Naser Alsayed, a researcher at SOAS University of London.

“Targeting these plants represents a major escalation and introduces what we could call a new water war,” he told The Telegraph.

A secret CIA assessment from the 1980s, declassified in 2010, warned that strikes on the Gulf’s desalination plants could trigger national emergencies and a regional refugee crisis.

“Although the loss of a single plant would likely cause only local hardship, successful attacks on several plants in the most dependent countries could generate a national crisis that could lead to panic flights from the country and civil unrest,” its analysts said.

That warning now reads less like foresight and more like a prophecy.

Iran and the Gulf states have long been vulnerable to disruptions to water supplies.

The Gulf states, in particular, are highly dependent on more than 400 desalination plants that line the coastline of the Arabian Peninsula.

Without them, cities like Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City and Riyadh, home to tens of millions of people, could not exist.

Saudi Arabia, for example, has no permanent rivers, so well over half of the drinking water for its population of 35 million comes from desalination plants, with the remainder drawn from underground aquifers and run-off from mountains in the south-west.

But Iran is also acutely vulnerable to potential attacks on water infrastructure – its water system was already teetering on the brink of collapse before the war broke out.

After five years of extreme drought, the reservoirs supplying Tehran, a city of 17 million, were below 10 per cent capacity by late 2025, prompting the Iranian president to warn that the capital may need to be evacuated.

Now, under sustained bombardment and with sanctions preventing the import of spare parts and engineers, the country faces the real possibility of running out completely.

“The country is suffering from what I call a ‘water bankruptcy’ state,” said Prof Kaveh Madani, Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “Water use has exceeded the sustainable or renewable supply for an extended period, to the point where some of the damage becomes irreversible.”

Rivers that once sustained farming and communities across Iran are now drying up, and groundwater reserves are being pumped out far faster than they can be replenished.

The Zayandeh Rud, which has irrigated the fields around Isfahan for centuries, has in recent years been reduced to a cracked plain of dried silt, while Lake Urmia, once the sixth largest lake in the world, has shrunk to less than a tenth of its former size.

For decades, Iranian development policies have been based on the assumption that engineering and extraction could overcome a vital shortage in the amount of water available.

While more than 600 large dams have been built, they have done little to compensate for the fact that there simply isn’t enough rain.

Annual rainfall has declined markedly in Iran, falling by around 20 per cent over the past two decades, according to the United Nations.

The UN now estimates that more than half of Iran’s population now lives in water-stressed areas.

Iran’s vulnerabilities in a water war would not be limited to its desalination plants, which provide only a small share of the country’s drinking water.

The dams, pumping stations and treatment works that its population of 88 million depend on for drinking water, agriculture and sanitation could all come under attack.

It would not be without precedent: throughout Middle Eastern history there have been numerous examples of water being weaponised.

Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king, is said to have destroyed the aqueduct supplying water to the city of Tyre in an attempt to end a 13-year siege in the sixth century BC.

In the 12th century, Saladin defeated a Crusader army by blocking their access to the Sea of Galilee and poisoning wells or filling them with sand.

More recently, in the 1960s, Arab states attempted to divert the waters of the Jordan River to prevent them from flowing into Israel’s National Water Carrier, sparking a series of confrontations that helped spark the Six-Day War.

During the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein targeted Kuwaiti infrastructure, including power and water systems.

And in Ukraine, Russia has launched more than 100 attacks on water infrastructure since the war began in 2022, targeting dams, pumping stations and treatment works.

László Csicsmann, head of the Centre for Contemporary Asia Studies at Budapest Corvinus University, pointed out that water supplies also depend on other critical infrastructure to function.

“The problem also lies with the energy infrastructure, since without it, water pumps cannot operate,” he explained.

The recent attacks on water sites by both sides open the door to the possibility of escalation, he added.

On March 7, the Iranian authorities claimed a US airstrike had destroyed a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting water supply to 30 villages and forcing the government to dispatch tanker trucks.

The following day, Bahrain’s Interior Ministry announced that an Iranian drone had struck one of its desalination facilities near Muharraq, injuring three people.

Then, on March 30, an Iranian drone struck a power and water complex in Kuwait, killing an Indian worker. 

Experts say that by threatening Iran’s water infrastructure, Mr Trump has raised the risk of regional escalation.

“When it comes to infrastructure, we’re seeing this tit-for-tat strategy consistently, and Iran openly talks about it,” explained Prof Madani. “Their calculation seems to be that this is the best way to be preventive: if someone attacks them, they respond with equivalent force to deter further attacks.”

He added: “Giving Iran a justification to retaliate against desalination plants – or even agricultural infrastructure – would be risky.”

Both sides are aware of the risks.

“Iran knows water is a critical vulnerability for itself. But they also know that the countries they’ve been attacking share similar vulnerabilities. So it’s a two-way street: water is both a weapon and a strategic consideration for all parties in the region,” said Dr Alsayed. “If things escalate, Iran is more than willing to take the rest of the region with them.”

Escalation could be catastrophic for the Gulf states.

Kuwait relies on desalination for 90 per cent of its drinking water, Bahrain for 95 per cent, and Qatar for 99 per cent.

Most Gulf cities, said Dr Alsayed, only hold between a few days and two weeks of strategic water reserves – enough time to begin an emergency response but nowhere near enough to sustain a population through long periods of disruption.

The region’s vulnerability is heightened by the fact that 90 per cent of this desalinated supply comes from just 56 plants.

“Many of these plants were not designed with military attacks in mind,” said Dr Alsayed.

Desalination plants are vast, complex industrial facilities, tightly integrated with power stations.

They work by removing salt and impurities from seawater, usually by pushing it through ultra-fine membranes under high pressure in a process known as reverse osmosis.

They could take months or years to repair in the event they suffer damage. The components they depend on may also simply not be available – in the case of Iran, due to sanctions, or for the rest of the Gulf, due to disruptions to shipping.

There is no real alternative to them, either.

Iran might be able to supply small villages by truck, but resupplying a city like Dubai in this way would be impossible.

Beyond creating an immediate crisis by cutting supplies of drinking water, a water war has the potential to do long-term damage to the region and the rest of the world.

In the Gulf, some 80 per cent of water is used by agriculture, meaning any disruption to water infrastructure immediately threatens crop production.

The consequences would ripple far beyond the region: South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa would bear the brunt of soaring food prices triggered by such a disruption.

The targeting of water infrastructure would also constitute a war crime. Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions forbids targeting infrastructure essential for the population, including water supplies.

“Desalination facilities are often-times necessary for the survival of the civilian population, and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” said Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

When asked by reporters on Tuesday what the military justification would be for targeting Iran’s desalination facilities, the White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, declined to answer.

Israel has long had its eye on Iran’s water supplies and sees them as a crucial vulnerability which it might one day choose to exploit to bring down the regime in Tehran.

A recent report from the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University found that “the water crisis has intensified the crisis of civilian confidence in the regime,” noting that numerous protests had already broken out in response to it in recent years.

In 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, shared a video of himself drinking water in a message aimed at the Iranian public. 

While the Gulf’s water supplies remain – mostly – behind a red line, the US and Israel are increasingly struggling to achieve their war aims and facing pressure to wrap up the conflict, and could choose to escalate.

A water war could then be on the cards, and experts believe the international community should take notice.

“I think this war is a huge wake-up call for governments and the public alike, including Iran,” said Dr Alsayed. “When water is involved, it’s not just about immediate casualties – it’s about the future habitability of the region. Attacks on these facilities could affect the ability of millions of people to live and sustain life over the long term.”

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