Iranian strikes have continued to target important infrastructure (Picture: Reuters)
Tehran has threatened to strike vital electrical plants across the Middle East if Donald Trump bombs power stations in Iran.
The threat is made more precarious given that Gulf Arab states have both their electrical and water supplies intermingled,with power stations necessary to desalinate their drinking water.
Over the weekend,Iran launched missiles targeting Dimona in Israel,near a facility key to its long-suspected atomic weapons programme. The Israeli facility was not damaged in the barrage.
Fatih Birol,the head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency,warned that the crisis in the Middle East has had a worse impact on energy markets than the two oil shocks of the 1970s and the Russia-Ukraine war combined.
Still,earlier today,Israel launched new attacks on the Iranian capital to target infrastructure in Tehran.
Trump also said the US would attack Iran’s power stations unless the country releases its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
Shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has come to a halt (Picture: Reuters)
His self-declared 48-hour deadline expires just before midnight GMT on Tuesday,further raising the stakes of the ongoing war with Iran.
Trump said in a social media post that if Tehran did not open the strategic waterway to all ships,the United States would ‘obliterate’ Iran’s power plants.
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said on Monday that if the US did that,Iran would respond by hitting power plants in all areas that supply electricity to American bases,‘as well as the economic,industrial and energy infrastructures in which Americans have shares’.
The Fars news agency,which is close to the Revolutionary Guard,published a list of such sites in what appeared to be a veiled threat.
It includes desalination plants as well as the UAE’s Barakah nuclear power plant,which has four reactors out in the western deserts of the country near its border with Saudi Arabia.
Iran has also said it will completely close the Strait if Trump follows through with the threat to attack Iranian power plants.
Iran’s death toll in the war has surpassed 1,500,its health ministry has said.
In Israel,15 people have been killed by Iranian strikes. More than a dozen civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states have been killed in strikes.
In Lebanon,authorities say Israeli strikes targeting Iran-linked militia Hezbollah have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than one million.
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