Throughout the region, related facilities with water and electricity– including desalination plants – have been damaged or put at risk as Iranian strikes expand beyond traditional targets.
However, it is unlikely that a single strike would cut off the water supply to the Gulf. The system is designed to absorb isolated disruptions, but sustained or multi-site attacks would begin to strain the supply much more quickly.
“In the Gulf, desalination is built with enough headroom so that the loss of a plant does not immediately appear on tap,” says Rabee Rustum, professor of water and environmental engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Dubai.
In Kuwait, Iranian drones attack damaged two power and desalination plants oil installations and started fires at two oil sites. Other sites, including Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, have been identified as potentially exposed.
“The desalination plant strike would be a strategic decision, but it would also come very close to, and in some cases exceed, a red line,” says Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.
Water infrastructure, Krieg explains, occupies a separate category. “Water infrastructure is not just another public service. In places that rely on desalination, it supports civilian survival, public health, hospital operations, sanitation and the fundamental legitimacy of the state.”
Krieg notes that international humanitarian law grants particular protection to civilian objects and objects essential to the survival of the civilian population. “This is precisely why attacks on water systems carry such serious legal and moral weight,” Krieg adds.
These incidents highlight a structural reality: desalination is essential to the water supply in the Gulf, and disruptions have immediate consequences on daily life.
How the system absorbs disturbances
At first glance, desalination appears vulnerable. Close a factory and the supply is reduced. In practice, the system is designed with layers of redundancy.
Factories operate across multiple sites, allowing production to be redistributed if one facility slows down. Water is also stored at different points across the network, including central reservoirs and building-level reservoirs, creating a buffer that delays disruption.
According to a statement to WIRED Middle East from Veolia, an environmental services provider whose technologies account for nearly 19 percent of the region’s desalination capacity, “the region’s water supply is diverse thanks to a network of numerous facilities distributed along the coastline.”
The company adds that distribution systems are interconnected, allowing plants to “support and replace each other as necessary,” helping to maintain continuity of service.
In the UAE, storage capacity generally covers around a week, while in other parts of the region it may be limited to two or three days, Veolia says.
In practice, this means that the system can absorb disturbances for a limited period. Once supplies are exhausted, water supplies depend on the ability of factories to continue producing enough water to meet demand.
The system that produces water
Unlike most regions, the Gulf does not rely on rivers or rainfall. It relies on a network of desalination plants along its coastline that continually convert seawater into drinking water.
Seawater is drawn into treatment facilities, filtered and treated either by reverse osmosis (forcing it through membranes to remove salt and impurities) or by thermal methods which evaporate and condense the water. The resulting supply is distributed through pipelines, stored in tanks and delivered to homes, hospitals and industry.
It is not a flexible system. It is designed to operate continuously, producing water at a scale to support cities, industrial activity and essential services. The Gulf States produce about 40 percent of the desalinated water of the worldoperating more than 400 factories throughout the region.
Dependence varies by country but is high everywhere. In the UAE, desalination accounts for 41 to 42 percent of the total water supply, while in Kuwait it provides around 90 percent of drinking water and in Saudi Arabia, around 70 percent.
When the disturbance becomes visible
For residents, the disruption would not be felt immediately: the water would continue to flow.
Rustum explains that buildings are supported by internal storage and pumping systems, meaning initial changes in supply may not be apparent. In many cases, the water pressure remains stable, even as the larger system adjusts.
This buffer allows cities to absorb short-term disruptions, with multiple factories, storage reserves and monitoring systems working to maintain continuity.
Larger impacts would only begin to be felt if multiple parts of the system were affected at the same time. In these scenarios, the compensation capacity of the system becomes more limited. Sustained disruption would pose a broader challenge, given that water supplies underpin hospital sterilization systems, sanitation networks, cooling infrastructure and industrial operations.
Over time, the consequences will therefore extend beyond households and also affect essential services and economic activity.
Where the limits begin
Rustum says the resilience of the system depends on disruptions remaining contained. “Cities depend on constant desalination production, but they can’t function without a headrest,” he says, pointing to strategic reserves, aquifer recharge and the distribution of production between multiple plants.
This buffer helps absorb short-term shocks, but it does not remove the system’s dependence on continuous operation.
“The delicate points are the sea water intake, the power supply to the factory and the distribution network,” he adds. “Everyone has layers of monitoring and backup.”
If the disturbance persists or affects several parts of the system simultaneously, the compensation capacity becomes more limited. In these scenarios, supply would become increasingly dependent on factories continuing to operate and the wider network maintaining production.
Rustum notes that even when input is affected, such as by contamination, plants can slow or halt operations while the system as a whole compensates. But this depends on the local and short-term nature of the disturbances.
As Krieg says, modern conflicts place increasing pressure not only on military targets but also on the systems that support civilian life. The effects are not always immediate, but once they begin, they spread quickly through homes, hospitals, and structures that support daily life.
In the Gulf, where water is produced rather than naturally sourced, desalination is not just infrastructure, but a point of vulnerability that is hard to replace and even harder to ignore.
This story was originally published on WIRED Middle East.