Eighty-Four Sites

Iran and its allies have struck Gulf infrastructure at least 135 times across 84 sites since February, and the equipment hit was repeatedly the small, slow-to-replace part that stops a whole facility. Gulf governments answered most of it with statements about falling debris and laws against filming the aftermath, which keeps much of the war's cost to its Arab neighbours out of the official record. One state, the UAE, has had no reported strike on its soil since 17 May, and why is the most consequential open question in that record.

Fujairah shows the method. The Emirati port south of the strait, the country's main outlet around the Hormuz blockade, was hit at least 19 times. A strike on 9 March destroyed one of its two matrix manifolds, the system of 62 pipelines that carries crude and fuel from terminals to the berths, and strikes days later took out the second. Loadings fell to 440,000 barrels a day, under half the 2025 average. Emirati officials attributed the first damage to debris.

The same precision runs through the rest of the Gulf. Two cold boxes at Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG plant were destroyed, and QatarEnergy puts full repair at three to five years. A hit on the power plant of the Al Taweelah aluminium smelter froze all 1,262 of its cells, and output will not recover until 2027. A drone struck an electrical building at the Barakah nuclear plant and pushed a reactor onto emergency diesel. At least four of Kuwait's eight combined power and desalination plants were hit, in a country that takes 90 percent of its drinking water from the sea, and Kuwait exported no crude at all in April for the first time since 1991. Five of Saudi Arabia's nine largest refineries have been damaged, and Saudi output sat below 7 million barrels a day for most of the war's first six months, down from more than 10 million.

Very little of this entered the public record as damage. Gulf governments issued at least 34 statements blaming debris from successful interceptions. Photographing the aftermath of a strike is illegal in five of the seven states hit. Fourteen industry and security specialists who reviewed the imagery judged debris a highly improbable cause of damage to essential equipment at dozens of sites. Every public claim that the Gulf's energy system is coping, in barrels moved or in crude "mostly handled", stands on a damage record its owners have kept thin.

The UAE is the exception inside that record. It was the most-struck Gulf state in the war's first two months, and no strike on its infrastructure has been reported since a drone sent from Iraq hit Barakah on 17 May. In June four sources described an Emirati release of frozen Iranian funds, two of them saying it bought a halt to the attacks. Abu Dhabi denied it categorically. A senior Iranian official later confirmed a transfer and said it had nothing to do with the strikes. Kuwait's plants were struck into late July, and Saudi refineries, pipelines and airports kept taking hits through September and October, while Fujairah set an export record.

Three readings fit that gap. The first is a paid arrangement. The second is a pause with its own causes, since Iran's last direct strike on the Emirates came on 4 May, weeks before any money reportedly moved. The third is that strikes continued in the state that polices images of damage most tightly and went unreported. The evidence available cannot choose between them.

Two developments would. A confirmed strike on Emirati soil would end the first reading. A second Gulf state found to have made a similar arrangement, after Iran reportedly approached two others, would make it the likeliest of the three.