DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran hit oil production facilities across the Middle East for a second day, lashing out at Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, despite President Trump’s attempts to de-escalate the spiraling conflict.
A day earlier, Mr. Trump said he had ordered Israel not to attack South Pars, Iran’s massive offshore natural gas field.
Mr. Trump threatened on social media Wednesday night to “blow up” all of South Pars, the world’s largest natural gas field, if the Iranian attacks on Middle East oil production continued. However, Iran’s neighbors reported fresh missile and drone attacks Thursday, sending oil prices soaring. Brent crude, the international benchmark, climbed to about $108 a barrel.
Iran said its attacks on the region were retaliation for Israeli airstrikes Wednesday on South Pars. The ongoing assaults are turning Gulf states against the besieged regime in Tehran.
Qatar expelled Iran’s military and security attaches Wednesday and gave them 24 hours to leave Doha after Iranian missiles struck Ras Laffan Industrial City, a gas processing and export complex on Qatar’s northern Persian Gulf coast. Ras Laffan handles roughly 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas supply. It was the first formal expulsion of Iranian diplomats by a Gulf state since the war began Feb. 28.
Saudi Arabia reserved the right to military action.
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“What little trust there was has completely been shattered, on multiple levels,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan told reporters in Riyadh on Thursday, hours after Iranian missiles targeted the city while Arab and Islamic foreign ministers were meeting there to discuss a way out of the war. On Thursday morning, a drone struck the SAMREF refinery, one of the kingdom’s largest crude processing facilities, in Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. “The level of accuracy in some of this targeting indicates that this is something that was premeditated, preplanned, preorganized and well thought out,” he said.
Azza Hashem, managing director of the Al Habtoor Research Center in Dubai, said the UAE was not caught off guard. “Fully expecting this kind of asymmetric warfare, the UAE prepared for the statistical reality that some munitions would slip through,” she told The Washington Times.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a Pentagon briefing that Iran had miscalculated. “Iran’s reckless attempt to strike civilian infrastructure has brought countries who maybe would not have been as all-in as they are today squarely into our orbit,” he said, naming the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting of foreign ministers from 12 Arab and Islamic states. Their joint statement called on Iran to halt strikes immediately. The meeting was underway when the missiles landed.
Iran is no longer blocking only the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and petroleum travels. It also is hitting the pipelines, terminals and gas fields built specifically for that contingency.
On Monday, Iranian drones struck the Shah gas field, operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., roughly 110 miles southwest of Abu Dhabi in the desert interior. Iran’s third hit this month to Fujairah targeted the infrastructure that the UAE spent $4.2 billion building to keep oil flowing if the Strait of Hormuz ever closed.
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Fujairah is a port city on the UAE’s eastern coast, facing the Gulf of Oman rather than the Persian Gulf, which is precisely what makes it strategically significant. Ships loading there never have to pass through the strait.
UAE daily output is down by more than half. Fujairah’s crude terminals are suspended. The Shah field is offline.
The Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline runs 236 miles from the Habshan oil fields — the UAE’s main onshore processing hub, deep in the Abu Dhabi desert — east across the peninsula to Fujairah. Its capacity is 1.5 million barrels per day, roughly 60% of the UAE’s normal export volume. The remaining 40% moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has now targeted both routes.
The pipeline carries crude oil only. Refined products, diesel, jet fuel and naphtha require separate infrastructure. Roughly 30% of Europe’s diesel imports and half its jet fuel imports came from the Middle East by 2026. Analysts describe the result as a distillate crisis centered on Europe, not a Hormuz disruption.
The Shah gas field, operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. in a joint venture with Occidental Petroleum, supplied 20% of the UAE’s total gas supply and 5% of the world’s granulated sulfur before the strike Monday. Shah’s sulfur feeds phosphate fertilizer producers globally. Urea prices have risen 25% in two weeks and are now being passed on to food costs across South and Southeast Asia.
Only five oil tankers left the area on March 11. About 500 remained stuck in the Gulf two weeks into the war. At least 16 vessels have been attacked, and at least eight seafarers have been killed. QatarEnergy, Kuwait Petroleum Corp. and Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. have declared force majeure, the legal notification that a company cannot meet its contracts because of circumstances beyond its control.
Iranian drones and missiles have hit Al Dhafra Air Base, a U.S. and French installation roughly 20 miles south of Abu Dhabi city that serves as the United States’ primary air operations hub in the Gulf. It is home to 3,500 troops.
Iran also has hit the Dubai International Financial Center, the glass-tower district in the heart of Dubai that houses the regional headquarters of most of the world’s major banks; a fuel tank near Dubai International Airport on March 16, which briefly closed the world’s busiest international aviation hub; the Shah gas field Monday; and Ras Laffan on Wednesday.
Dubai schools and universities shifted to remote learning on the first day of the war. The government extended that order through at least April. The Ministry of Human Resources directed the private sector to keep workers away from open spaces over concerns about shrapnel from intercepted munitions.
Yara Aziz, a senior economist at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, a London-based advisory body to central banks and sovereign funds, said the Gulf is caught in a paradox. Higher oil prices normally would mean more government revenue. This time, the war pushing up prices is the same war blocking the ports that ship the oil.
“When higher prices are driven by conflict that threatens export routes and energy infrastructure,” Ms. Aziz said, “the gains are offset by operational risks, shipping delays and logistical constraints.
“Even if hostilities ease, damaged infrastructure, reduced shipping confidence and disrupted trade flows can persist,” she said.
Goldman Sachs cut its 2026 Gulf growth forecast to 0.4%. Kuwait is projected to contract by 2.7%, and Bahrain by 0.5%. J.P. Morgan cut non-oil growth forecasts by 1.2 percentage points across the region, with the UAE taking the steepest cut at 2.3 points.
Three of the four largest Gulf economies have begun reviewing their sovereign wealth fund strategies, weighing reversed investment pledges and divestments from overseas assets, Reuters reported. Those funds collectively hold roughly $5 trillion, much of it in the U.S. markets. S&P Global estimated that Gulf banks could face $307 billion in deposit outflows if the conflict deepens.
Matthew McManus, adjunct professor of energy diplomacy at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, said the natural gas situation has no equivalent safety net. “There is no strategic petroleum reserve for gas,” he said.
Ras Laffan, built on Qatar’s northeastern coastline and expanded over three decades into the world’s single largest concentration of LNG production capacity, accounts for about 18% of global supply. American LNG will have to fill the gap. That substitution will take months and will raise prices in Europe and Asia before it helps.
Khalaf Al Habtoor is the founder of the Al Habtoor Group, whose construction arm was part of the joint venture awarded a $790 million contract in 2008 to build Trump International Hotel and Tower on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the artificial island that juts into the Persian Gulf off Dubai’s coastline. The project was shelved in 2011 after the global financial crisis.
Mr. Al Habtoor addressed Mr. Trump in an open letter on March 5. “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran?” he wrote. “You have placed the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab countries at the heart of a danger they did not choose.”
Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed, said Iran’s targeting of Gulf states reflects “military failure, moral bankruptcy and political isolation.” He confirmed that “the UAE exerted sincere efforts until the very last moment to mediate between Washington and Tehran to avert this war.”
A gap has opened between the state’s long-term vision and the views of some in the business community. The war has made it visible without resolving it.
Ms. Hashem said the UAE defense architecture has held.
It combines Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot interceptors. These American-built missile defense systems are the same ones ringing U.S. bases across the region, with hardened pipeline infrastructure and cyber defenses.
Drone operators map port damage berth by berth in real time, isolating compromised sections without shutting the entire port. The interception rate was about 95%.
UAE engineers brought Fujairah’s key berths and its main supertanker jetty, the deep-water terminal capable of loading the largest crude carriers afloat, back online within 72 hours.
“This comprehensive resilience framework is exactly why the UAE, even while still under these unprecedented attacks, remains fully capable of transiting its oil from Fujairah and throughout the Gulf,” Ms. Hashem said.
Damyana Bakardzhieva, senior research fellow for economic diplomacy at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, said the strikes will accelerate the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.’s plans to build a second crude pipeline by next year. The new line would run from Jebel Dhanna, the UAE’s main crude export terminal on the Persian Gulf coast west of Abu Dhabi, east across the desert to Fujairah via the processing hub at Habshan.
The second pipeline would double UAE crude export capacity that bypasses the strait entirely, from the current 1.8 million barrels per day to more than 3 million.
Tehran has constructed legal cover for the strait’s closure. Iran’s non-ratification of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea allows it to argue that only innocent passage applies in the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide chokepoint between the Iranian coast and the Omani peninsula of Musandam, giving Tehran claimed authority to stop any vessel it deems a security threat.
The strait is technically open under international law, but it is effectively inaccessible.
The Trump administration has said the U.S. is not ready to escort commercial vessels through the strait. Naval assets are committed to active combat operations.
Ambassador Joey Hood, former acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said the diplomatic infrastructure to manage the crisis barely exists.
“We have no ambassadors at all in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Hood said Thursday. “In Kuwait, we not only don’t have an ambassador, we don’t have diplomats anymore.”
Nineteen days of war involving 25 countries have produced neither a clear outcome nor an exit strategy from any of the three main belligerents.
“A weakened regime with that ideology is a much more dangerous regime,” he said.
“Military tools are once again demonstrating their incapacity to impose durable peace in the region,” Ms. Bakardzhieva said.
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