The Israeli Media Is Laying The Groundwork For a Permanent Israeli Occupation Of Southern Lebanon
The Dissident | March 20, 2026
Israeli journalists with connections to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party are now openly calling for an Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon and the establishment of Jewish settlements, after the Israeli bombing campaign has displaced over one million people from Southern Lebanon.
Netanyahu-connected figures in the Israeli media are now using this mass displacement to push for a permanent Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon.
Amit Segal, a Likud connected journalist, in the Miriam Adelson funded outlet Israel Hayom praised Trump for supporting the idea of an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and hoped that the Trump administration would approve an Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon, writing, “Trump, a man with no sentimentality for old borders, already shook the Middle East when he agreed in principle to recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria in the framework of the Peace to Prosperity plan, and when he supported mass emigration from Gaza. The mass migration from southern Lebanon has already happened. The only question is whether he will give Israel merely de facto approval of its new northern border or de jure approval as well.”
Referring to IDF militants who expanded up to the Litani River in Southern Lebanon, Amit Segal hoped it would lead to permanent occupation, writing, “Is this a temporary, isolated event? Soldiers who went deeper into Lebanon this week should think again, and remember that IDF forces have now been on the summit of the Syrian Hermon since the end of 2024, with no expiration date.”
Taking it a step further, Michael Freund, a former deputy communications director of Benjamin Netanyahu, writing in The Jerusalem Post, explicitly advocated for a permanent Israeli occupation with Jewish settlements of Southern Lebanon calling for Israel to “incorporate southern Lebanon into sovereign Israel and settle it with Jews.”
He added that, “A growing movement in Israel has begun to argue that the only way to guarantee lasting security in the North is not merely military control of territory but the establishment of permanent Jewish communities there. One such initiative is Uri Tzafon (‘Awaken, O North’), an organization advocating the settlement of southern Lebanon as a long-term security solution.”
He advocated that Israel “maintains control of the territory south of” the Litani River and the “establishment of Jewish communities there”.
Michael Freund cited biblical Israel as a justification for stealing Lebanese land, writing, “Biblical sources describe the borders of Canaan as extending northward toward Sidon, and the territory of the tribes of Israel included it as well” along with arguing that Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon is needed for “security”, (i.e. destroying Hezbollah’s ability to defend against Israeli expansion).
The motive behind the war in Iran has always been the Greater Israel project. With Israel’s mass displacement of Southern Lebanon, the Likud-friendly media is already explicitly stating that this move was done to advance the project and expand Israeli territory into Southern Lebanon.
Airlines Suffer Losses Estimated at $53Bln Due to Middle East Conflict
Sputnik – 21.03.2026
On February 28, the United States and Israel began striking targets in Iran, including in Tehran, causing damage and civilian casualties. Iran has carried out retaliatory strikes on Israeli territory, as well as on US military targets in the Middle East.
The damage caused by US and Israeli aggression against Iran amounted to approximately $53 billion for the 20 largest publicly traded airlines, the Financial Times reported, based on its own calculations.
Airline executives are warning of the consequences caused by the sustained rise in oil prices, disruptions at Gulf airports, and a potential hit to global demand, the Financial Times added.
In the coming months, passengers planning trips on routes that are not related to the Middle East will face a sharp rise in ticket prices as airlines try to protect their revenues, the newspaper reported.
Have you heard the latest joke about Trump and Iran?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 21, 2026
What’s the difference between Vietnam and the Iran War? Answer: Trump had an exit strategy for Vietnam.
How much collective responsibility can the West take for the shitstorm it is in now, otherwise known as ’The Iran War’? Many would like to blame most of it on Trump for being a manchild and just going ahead with the most madcap military venture NATO countries have ever known, against all the expert advice, and ending up with a regime which is even more hardcore for having a bomb, world energy prices soaring and causing chaos due to Iran choking the Straits of Hormuz, and the entire relationship between Washington and its allies in the region reduced to a handful of dust?
The reality is that Trump took the decision to go to war not based on one issue alone. Left-wing commentators in the U.S. would like us to think it was to distract the media away from the latest revelations of the DOJ and the Epstein files, which had a tome of evidence accusing him of having inappropriate relations with a 13-year-old girl. But there were other reasons which pushed him over the line. Top of that list is surely that Netanyahu was blackmailing him, threatening to release recordings of his phone calls with Epstein where they talk about young girls. Add to that, it was probably pointed out to him that he was not going to keep both houses when the midterms come unless a considerable amount of Jewish American money was pumped into his campaign.
But it isn’t just Trump that has got us all into this mess that we’re in. For decades, the EU allowed Israel to ratchet up their brutal occupation of Palestinians and in the process to dehumanize them, leading to the climax of the Gaza genocide. This gave an unrealistic sense of impunity, almost akin to a divine intervention to religious fanatics who already believed that they were the chosen people and that they had a right to murder those beneath them and steal their property. Look at the reaction of western governments and in particular the EU when the events of October 7th unfolded and how they supported any response at all from Israel. In fact, just look at how any UK government minister reacted to the start of the Iran War, which, if we didn’t know better, might have thought it was started by Iran.
Trump is isolated now not for his rank stupidity, or his delusional views about who he is and what America is. He is isolated by EU leaders as none of them want to be part of a new Vietnam War scenario which goes on for years and only produces body bags — only to keep a U.S. president from looking like a total fuckwit in front of his own people.
Yes, the reality is that the vast majority of Americans don’t really understand what Trump just did in Iran. Even today, something like 80 percent of Republicans polled agree with his decision to begin a conflict with Iran, while Democrats are in the other camp altogether, perhaps better informed of Trump’s rationale behind going ahead with the plan.
Most likely the plan had been on the table for months and each time a military expert pointed out the harsh realities of it bringing blowback on a global level, affecting not only pump prices rocketing but just about everything else over the longer term, they were ignored or swapped for a sycophant in a uniform who just nodded like a demented parcel shelf toy dog until he had a whole room full of them. Does the American public understand just how self-indulgent Trump has been and that he has now created for himself a new threat, like a magician pulling a pigeon out of his hat? While the so-called ’threat’ from Iran goes from being a vague, opaque notion which most people don’t even believe, to being something quite real and lucid to the point that, ironically, Trump can now present it to the gullible public and hope they don’t notice that he manufactured it all by himself.
Yet it is remarkable how detached Europeans are from Trump and his plans. What an extraordinary example of how diplomacy is entirely dead and not worth the paper it’s written on, when EU ambassadors had no clue about these meetings and what came out of them. Shouldn’t EU leaders have stepped in at some point and warned him he was playing with fire and that the only certainty was that the West was guaranteed to be the burn victim? What about our intelligence services? It is inconceivable they didn’t know what was coming? Did they not tip off their own governments? Likely they did and that London, Paris and Berlin simply did nothing, such is the non-existent special relationship between Old Europe and Washington. Even Britain.
Transatlantic relations between the U.S. and EU countries is never going to be the same again if something can’t be done to get a dialogue going. Sure, Trump may pull the U.S. out of NATO just out of spite, like a fuming four-year-old who’s just lost his ball to an angry neighbour, but other, bigger relations are probably burnt forever. Washington’s relations with Israel can never go back to the Master (Israel) Slave (U.S.) set-up. And America’s relations with Gulf Arab countries is going to be hard to put back on an even keel when Arab leaders can see how fake they were in the first place.
Trump’s childish revelation recently that he couldn’t have imagined Iran hitting the GCC countries feels like a seven-year-old boy trying to explain to a room full of adults that he didn’t realise that borrowing his friend’s go-kart would result in so much damage as no one told him the jalopy would go so fast down a hill. The EU has a similar idiot in power, though. Kaja Kallas, a name which conjures up a 1980s underarm deodorant or a Greek ferry company, is blessed by at least not looking as stupid as she really is. This daughter of an Estonian communist politician, who was happy to live the high life under the Soviets, seems to be almost entirely brain dead when she gets on the podium or in front of the six microphones (all of EU TV networks who are actually paid cash to broadcast her moronic ramblings) and harps on about Russia getting more money now from oil sales. It’s literally like watching someone in a mental institution who hasn’t taken their medication talking to the mirror with a toothbrush as a mic and trying to sound clever.
But it’s no joke how the West got to where it is with Iran, when these same buffoons for decades have been encouraging Israel to expand its ideas and, red in tooth and claw, reach a point today where they are either starving people so as to ethnically cleanse Gaza or simply bombing women and children in their tents — or taking over part of Lebanon, a decades-old fantasy which didn’t end well in 1982 when they tried it before.
So the Trump joke is less funny when you see it in the light of who led him to where he is and what his inconsistent messages are to EU leaders. He is stuck in the past and tends to be someone trying to correct or duplicate U.S. foreign policy. Of course, he lacks élan, though, which is also part of the problem with such leaders. In the early 70s, when Nixon wanted to devalue the dollar but retain its power around the world, EU leaders were horrified. Apparently, he simply said to them: “It’s our dollar, but it’s your problem.”
Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank
By Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal | The Grayzone | March 20, 2026
The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.
The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word a document originally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”
The FDD document was authored by Tzvi Kahn, the former assistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
A March 2, 2026 statement issued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analyst Stephen McIntyre noted Thursday.
While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.
Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.
A 2009 investigation by journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was mostly like the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.
While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”
At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.
A number of the claims are undermined by the very sources they cite, including a December 2019 incident in which the Trump administration insisted “Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah terrorists killed an American civilian contractor and wounded several U.S. service members in a rocket attack at K1 Air Base in Kirkuk, Iraq.” But the Reuters article cited by the White House as proof that Iran was responsible made no such claim, explicitly cautioning that “no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.” In reality, Reuters suggested the attack was the work of “Islamic State militants operating in the area [who] have turned to insurgency-style tactics.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time that “we don’t know” how operationally involved Iran was in the January 28 attack that killed three US troops, “but it really doesn’t matter.”
“We have FDD”: Israel’s favorite Washington cutout
In tax documents filed with the IRS upon its founding in 2001, FDD was originally named EMET, which is Hebrew for “truth.” The fledgling outfit described its mission as working to “enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.” It changed its name soon after, presumably to sound less overtly Israeli.
FDD has since emerged as the leading Washington-based think tank pushing the US toward war with Iran. During the first Trump administration, FDD participated in a $1.5 million dollar State Department initiative to attack critics of the policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. At the time, FDD was openly promoting a military assault on Iran. The think tank’s staff are brought to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee more than those of any other think tank, invariably to advance conflict with Tehran.
During a 2017 conference of the Israeli American Council in Washington DC, then-Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs Sima Vakhnin-Gil was recorded by undercover journalist James Kleinfeld during a private breakout session. The Israeli military-intelligence official named FDD as a partner in a covert campaign to spy on Americans involved in Palestine solidarity activity.
“This is something that only a country can do the best,” Vakhnin-Gil said. “We have FDD. We have others working on this.”
The Israeli American Council was sponsored by a billionaire who has also been a top donor to the FDD: the Sheldon and Miriam Adelson Foundation. Since the death of Sheldon Adelson, his Israeli widow, Miriam, has emerged as the top donor to Trump’s political campaigns. Having donated hundreds of millions to Trump and his allies, Adelson clearly expected him to wage war on Iran on behalf of Israel, according to conservative former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
Since Trump thrilled his Israel-aligned donors by attacking Iran, FDD has provided the White House with more than talking points for justifying war on Iran. It has also proposed civilian targets in Iran for the US military to strike. These included the Tehran oil depot which Israel bombed on March 8, causing massive fires that shrouded the city of 9 million in toxic fumes.
After the strike triggered a wave of punishing retaliatory Iranian attacks on oil infrastructure in US-allied countries in the region, Trump advisors expressed regret. “We don’t think it was a good idea,” one told Axios. But by then, it was too late to avoid escalation. They had followed the FDD-authored, Israeli-designed script into a quagmire.
Israel-linked arms facility set ablaze in EU
RT | March 20, 2026
An anti-Zionist group has claimed responsibility for a fire at a warehouse belonging to a defense firm linked to Israel’s Elbit Systems in the Czech Republic.
The Earthquake Faction, which describes itself as “an internationalist underground network,” posted a video purportedly showing the arson attack on an industrial facility in the Czech town of Pardubice on Friday, along with images of the burned-out building.
It said the site was used to “develop weaponry used by the Zionist entity to massacre people daily in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and across West Asia.”
Firefighters extinguished the blaze, no injuries were reported, and police said there was no danger to the public. Officials said the incident is being treated as a suspected terrorist attack.
The facility is operated by LPP Holding, a Czech arms manufacturer producing civilian and military equipment. In 2023, the company announced cooperation with Israel’s Elbit Systems on drone development.
Headquartered in Haifa, the firm is Israel’s largest defense manufacturer, specializing in unmanned systems, precision weapons, and electronic warfare equipment.
The Czech Republic, an EU and NATO member, is a close ally of Israel. Czech officials have supported US and Israeli military actions against Iran and condemned Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Iran Proposes Creating Middle East Security Structure With All Regional States – President
Sputnik – 20.03.2026
TEHRAN – Iran proposes creating a Middle East security structure with the participation of regional countries, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Friday.
“We are ready to resolve all problems with you. In order to ensure peace in the region, we propose to create a security structure in the Middle East, which will include Islamic countries, in order to ensure peace, stability and security,” Pezeshkian said in an address on the occasion of the Iranian New Year.
Middle Eastern countries do not need the presence of “outsiders,” the president said.
Pezeshkian said that the United States and Israel had no reason to assassinate late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“They killed our leader and our commanders without any reason or logic,” Pezeshkian said in a speech marking the upcoming Iranian New Year.
IDF threatens ‘elimination’ for Russian leaders who ‘wish Israel ill’
By Wyatt Reed and Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | March 19, 2026
Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.
Israeli military spokeswoman Anna Ukolova has drawn outrage in Moscow after threatening that Russian authorities who “wish Israel ill” could be subject to “elimination,” while suggesting Israel could hack into Russian closed-circuit television cameras to identify and track targets.
Asked by a journalist with Russian radio broadcaster RBC whether Israel had access to Russian traffic cameras, Ukolova declined to answer directly but warned that “Khamenei’s elimination shows our capabilities are serious” and that “no one who wishes us harm will be left aside.”
She added, ominously, “I hope Moscow does not wish Israel ill right now – I’d like to believe that.”
In response to a post by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who wrote that the IDF spokeswoman threatened that “Russian authorities [will] be killed if they take [an] anti-Israel position,” Ukolova claimed Dugin was spreading “fake news.” But she declined to clarify how her remarks had been incorrectly interpreted.
Ukolova’s statements came just days after it was revealed that a large number of Russian CCTVs were potentially using BriefCam – an Israeli video analysis software that closely matches the description of a program the Netanyahu regime reportedly deployed to track Iranian movements outside the home of Iran’s Supreme Leader before they assassinated him during their February 28 sneak attack.
On March 12, Russian outlet Mash revealed that the Israeli software BriefCam “has been used in Russia by private providers since the 2010s.” Founded at Israel’s Hebrew University in 2007, BriefCam uses AI to let users “review hours of video in minutes” and “make [their] video searchable, actionable and quantifiable.” In 2024, BriefCam was absorbed by a Dutch subsidiary of the Canon Group named Milestone Systems, which publicly pledges to “amplify what organizations of any size can see, do and achieve with video.”
“Our patented VIDEO SYNOPSIS® technology condenses hours of surveillance into a short summary by overlaying multiple events—each tagged with its original timestamp—onto a single frame, letting you filter them by object type and attributes,” the company’s BriefCam page crows. An analysis by Al Jazeera revealed those attributes include “gender, age group, clothing, movement patterns and time spent in a given location.”
Originally deployed by Israel’s Ministry of Housing and Construction to safeguard illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, BriefCam has been used by governments all over the world, including those in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Pakistan, Israel, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, India, Spain, Taiwan. It’s also been deployed in the US, with police in Hartford, Connecticut adopting the software in 2022. In 2025, a French court found the government’s use of BriefCam was illegal, citing multiple violations of French and European privacy laws.
As of publication, BriefCam appears to be incorporated into dozens of so-called “video monitoring systems,” including Milestone’s own VMS XProtect surveillance system.
A promotional video shows the numerous surveillance systems that BriefCam operates within.
According to the Russian outlet Mash, a number of prominent Moscow businesses, institutions, and buildings use VMS XProtect surveillance system, including the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a 72-story skyscraper named “Eurasia,” and a huge exhibit space known as the Zotov Center. Though Milestone officially ended operations in Russia in 2022 amid the war in Ukraine, Mash reports that some software distributors in Russia “still offer to install the hacked software and hide this in the documents.”
Attacks on enemy energy facilities not over yet, strikes ongoing: Iran
Al Mayadeen | March 19, 2026
The spokesperson for the Iranian armed forces, Khatam al-Anibya Central Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaghari, warned on Thursday that Iran’s strikes against energy infrastructure in the region are not over.
He stressed that further strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure would trigger an even stronger response that would target enemy assets and those of the allies of Iran’s enemies. Zolfaghari warned that future responses would not stop until adversary energy assets are “completely destroyed”.
SAMREF refinery in Yanbu under attack
On Thursday, an aerial attack targeted the Saudi Aramco-operated SAMREF refinery in Yanbu, an industry source told Reuters, in the latest escalation in the Gulf following US-Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure.
The SAMREF refinery, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil, was struck in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu. The source claimed the attack caused minimal impact, with no immediate reports of significant disruption to operations.
It is worth noting that Gulf states have largely maintained limited and tightly controlled disclosures regarding attacks on critical infrastructure and US-linked military assets on their territory. Official statements have overstated the interception of incoming missiles and drones, often highlighting high success rates, while offering little detail on damage or operational disruption. The United Arab Emirates has even claimed that debris from interceptions hit its facilities and caused huge plumes of smoke to rise in al-Fujairah, instead of admitting that its defenses failed to intercept drones.
On Wednesday night, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense also reported that it successfully intercepted ballistic missiles targeting assets in Riyadh. Meanwhile, footage taken by migrant workers in the area showed multiple direct impacts.
Numerous energy facilities and assets in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar were struck overnight.
Iran responds in kind to all
Iranian officials have repeatedly said that security can either be achieved for all or for none, emphasizing that insecurity in Iran will lead to insecurity across the region.
The attacks on US-linked energy facilities follow a series of US-Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the strategic South Pars gas field. In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IGC) issued evacuation warnings for multiple oil and gas facilities across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, explicitly naming the Yanbu refinery among its targets.
Yanbu has emerged as a critical export hub since Iran effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz for US-Israeli-linked vessels and products earlier in the war. The waterway, through which roughly a fifth of global oil supply typically passes, has long been a cornerstone of international energy flows.
With Hormuz disrupted, Yanbu and the UAE’s al-Fujairah port became key alternative outlets. However, Fujairah has also come under repeated attacks in recent days, forcing suspensions of operations.
Targeted assets
QatarEnergy reported that Iranian missile strikes on the Ras Laffan industrial city, home to the country’s primary liquefied natural gas processing facilities, caused “extensive damage”. A nearby vessel was also damaged in an attack in the morning.
UAE authorities halted operations at the Habshan gas facility following the alleged interception of a drone attack.
An oil refinery in Kuwait was targeted in a drone strike this morning, sparking a “limited” fire, according to state media. The fire at the Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery was reportedly contained, and there were no reports of injuries, according to the Kuwait News Agency. The oil refinery is located about 500 kilometers south of Kuwait City. It is one of the largest oil refineries in the region, with a petroleum production capacity of 730,000 barrels per day.
With key export terminals under mounting strain and alternative routes repeatedly disrupted, the escalation led by Trump and Netanyahu appears to have further compounded, rather than resolved, the very crisis their initial aggression set in motion, deepening instability across global energy markets.
US dragged by Israel into ‘unlawful war’ with Iran – Gulf state
RT | March 19, 2026
The US has been drawn by Israel into an “unlawful war” against Iran and needs help to disengage, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has said.
In an opinion piece published in The Economist on Wednesday, the Middle East nation’s top diplomat called on US allies in the region to “tell the truth” about the conflict and admit that Washington “has lost control” of its own foreign policy. “There are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it,” he wrote, referring to the US and Iran.
The US maintains close security and defense partnerships with six Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman – and has a significant military presence in the region, including bases and naval facilities.
The escalation has had economic and security consequences for these states, with Iran retaliating against targets on their territory. Gulf officials have reportedly complained they were not consulted or warned before the US and Israel launched the campaign against Iran on February 28.
Albusaidi, who acted as a mediator in nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran, wrote that the parties had twice come close to a deal in nine months, noting that the airstrike campaign began immediately after the most substantive talks.
”Israel and America again launched an unlawful military strike against the peace that had briefly appeared really possible,” he wrote, adding that Iran’s retaliation was “inevitable.”
He argued that Washington’s greatest mistake was “entering a war that is not its own,” adding that Israel seeks regime change in Iran, while US interests lie in ending nuclear proliferation and securing energy supplies.
The US leadership must “decide where its national interests really lie, and act accordingly,” Albusaidi wrote. He acknowledged that while returning to talks may prove difficult for both sides, renewed negotiations, potentially mediated by the Gulf states, may provide a path forward.
Tehran has described the negotiations as a US-Israeli deception operation. Former US National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent said that Israel and allied media figures ran a “misinformation campaign” to push Washington toward war with Iran, according to his resignation letter published on Thursday.
Former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, also blamed the conflict on Israel, claiming that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu “somehow convinced” US President Donald Trump “to support his views.”
Israel’s War on Iran’s Grid: How the South Pars Strike Turned Energy into a Weapon
By Freddie Ponton – 21st Century Wire – March 19, 2026
In the early hours of March 18, Israeli drones tore into four gas‑treatment plants in Assaluyeh on Iran’s southern coast, where sour gas from phases 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the South Pars field is cleaned, separated and turned into the fuel that keeps the country’s lights on, homes heated and factories supplied. Iranian officials ordered the plants offline to contain the fires, and industry analysts immediately warned that production from the offshore platforms feeding those trains would have to be cut back. Within an hour of the strike being reported, European gas prices and Brent crude jumped, because traders understood what most headlines did not. This was not a symbolic hit on an abstract “gas field,” but a deliberate attack on a conversion node at the heart of Iran’s domestic energy system and a critical pillar of the wider Gulf energy order.
At the same time, Donald Trump was on social media threatening that if Iran retaliated again against Qatar’s LNG hub at Ras Laffan, he would “blow up the entirety” of South Pars – the largest gas field on the planet, and interestingly, a reservoir Iran shares with Qatar. The man who joined Israel in authorising the first strikes on Iranian production facilities is now openly dangling the prospect of destroying the shared gas reservoir that keeps tens of millions of people warm, powered and employed. That is not deterrence, only a head of state experimenting in public with the language of total economic annihilation.
Trump’s own Truth Social post about the strike reads like a rambling attempt to distance Washington from the attack while threatening to “blow up the entirety” of South Pars if Iran hits Qatar again. The post deserves closer attention later in this story.
ASSALUYEH: WHERE GAS BECOMES POWER
To see what was attacked in Assaluyeh is to understand that the language matches the target. South Pars itself is the Iranian half of a single, giant reservoir under the Gulf, known as the North Field in Qatar, which together contain around a tenth of the world’s proven gas reserves. Iranian officials say South Pars covers 24 phases and provides between 70–75% of Iran’s gas production, feeding power plants, industry, petrochemical complexes and gasoline production. The gas that makes that possible must pass through places like Assaluyeh, where onshore plants strip out condensate, liquefied petroleum gases and natural gas liquids before returning dry gas to the grid and sending liquids on to refineries and export jetties. Over two decades, the South Pars Special Economic Energy Zone has grown into a dense cluster of processing trains and downstream plants with total gas‑processing capacity on the order of a billion cubic metres per day and around twenty‑one petrochemical units producing close to forty million tonnes per year of urea, methanol, polyethene, and other basic chemicals.
Israel did not attack the offshore reservoir. It attacked the pipes, columns and separators that turn raw gas into power, plastics, fertiliser and fuel. The four targeted plants process sour gas from phases 3, 4, 5 and 6, which are mature, are heavily integrated blocks that feed directly into Iran’s domestic grid and petrochemical system. Shutting those trains, even temporarily, forces operators to throttle back production on the linked platforms and starves downstream complexes of both dry gas and feedstock. In concrete terms, that means less gas available for electricity generation on a grid already prone to summer blackouts, less feed for petrochemical plants that supply everything from fertiliser to plastics, and less condensate flowing through the storage and export facilities that sit alongside the gas plants on the Persian Gulf shore.
Iranian reports speak of powerful explosions at several Assaluyeh facilities, fires around storage tanks and gas units, and workers being evacuated as emergency crews tried to contain the damage. From a planner’s point of view, this is a high‑leverage target: a handful of processing units at the convergence of offshore production and onshore consumption whose disruption sends shockwaves up the supply chain and down into the civilian economy. From the point of view of the people whose houses, factories and hospitals depend on those flows, it looks like something else entirely – an attack on the infrastructure of daily life.
That is the first truth this strike reveals: Israel has shifted from fighting Iran’s armed forces to fighting the country’s energy system, the circulation of fuel that keeps the state conscious.
This is not a one‑off aberration. During the twelve‑day war of June 2025, an earlier Israeli strike hit the Phase 14 processing plant at Assaluyeh, forcing a shutdown and firefighting operation before Iranian engineers brought the plant back online within two weeks. The March 2026 strikes returned to the same nerve centre but widened the cut: instead of Phase 14 alone, the drones went after four plants tied to phases 3–6, which together represent a much larger share of South Pars throughput and a deeper incision into Iran’s ability to turn offshore gas into usable energy. What is being tested here is not just Iran’s repair capacity. It is how much of its gas‑conversion system can be burned down before the political cost becomes untenable.
FROM MILITARY TARGETS TO CIVILIAN PUNISHMENT
The crucial point is that gas in Iran is not a luxury export commodity, but the country’s primary fuel for power generation, industrial heat and residential heating. Well over ninety per cent of the gas Iran produces is consumed domestically, not exported. It keeps homes warm in winter, feeds cement and steel plants, drives turbines in power stations and prevents rolling blackouts on a grid that is already fragile. When you hit Assaluyeh, you are not trimming a few cargoes of condensate to Asia. You are reaching into the core of a domestic energy system that supports nearly ninety million people – the apartment blocks in Tehran that already live with scheduled outages, the small factories in Isfahan that depend on steady voltage to keep lines moving, the provincial hospitals that cannot function when the generators sputter.
Even the outlets trying to normalise the strike cannot entirely avoid that reality. They call South Pars an “energy lifeline”, stress that it powers much of Iran’s electricity system and note that the onshore plants at Assaluyeh are central to separating condensate and LPG from the gas that then runs into Iranian networks. “Energy lifeline” is the language of necessity, not of optional revenue. To choose that target is to choose to tamper with the civilian infrastructure that stands between a functioning society and a rolling crisis of blackouts, shortages and industrial breakdown. “Collective punishment” is usually invoked in the context of bombs on apartment blocks or food embargoes. Here it is delivered through valves and turbines.
It is precisely at this point, when questions of necessity and legitimacy collide, that the recent behaviour of Washington’s own security establishment strips away the alibi that this was a war forced by urgent facts. In a few sentences at a Senate hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers that only the president can decide what is an “imminent threat” from Iran, even as senior aides were warning her that there was no evidence Iran had restarted enrichment or posed an immediate nuclear danger. Two days earlier, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned, saying in his letter that he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” that Iran posed “no imminent threat,” and that Israel had pressured the United States into the conflict. Those two moments do not need pages of commentary. Together they are enough: the official charged with guarding the integrity of U.S. intelligence rewrites “threat” as a presidential mood, and the official charged with synthesising terrorist threats walks out saying the war is manufactured.
In other words, while Israeli pilots and U.S. operators are hitting the infrastructure that keeps Iranian civilians alive, the people at the top of the American system are quietly admitting that the supposed emergency justifying those strikes does not exist in the way the public was told. The last line of defence, a reality defined by evidence rather than by political need, has been crossed, and it has been crossed at the exact moment the war shifted from military targets to the machinery of everyday survival.
Trump’s Truth Social statement makes that shift even starker. It is not a clarification, and reads more like a hostage note. South Pars is being turned into collateral for Qatar’s LNG security, and Trump denies U.S. prior knowledge of Israel’s first strike while claiming the right to decide if and when the entire shared field is destroyed. In one message, he signals that the energy backbone of Iran and Qatar is now a bargaining chip Washington is prepared to sacrifice to enforce its war.
That is the second truth of this episode: the war on Iran’s civilian infrastructure is being waged under a definition of “threat” that collapses into whatever the president needs it to be.
Once a president starts talking about “blowing up the entirety” of the field that keeps both Iran and Qatar running, the fiction that this is a contained war collapses.
Exporting the Energy Shock
By treating Iran’s South Pars complex and linked Gulf energy infrastructure as disposable targets, Israel and the United States have not just escalated a regional war; they have shifted the economic pain onto societies that never signed up for this fight, from Turkish households to European workers and Indian farmers now absorbing the fallout.
Turkey: forced into a rigged market
In Turkey, the cost of turning South Pars into a battlefield is already measurable. Analysts note that Iran supplies gas to Turkey by pipeline, and that any prolonged disruption would force buyers to look for replacement cargoes on the LNG market. That “elsewhere” is the spot market, where Asian demand has already begun pulling cargoes away from Europe as importers scramble to replace lost Gulf supply. In practice, a strike pitched as pressure on Iran becomes a higher import bill for a NATO member and another inflationary squeeze on households and industry.
Europe: dragged back toward 2022
In Europe, the impact showed up first on trading screens. After disruption to Qatari LNG output, benchmark gas prices on the Dutch TTF hub jumped by as much as 45%, reaching around €46 per megawatt-hour. Reuters then reported that Asian buyers scrambling for LNG replacement cargoes were already pulling shipments toward Asia, reinforcing the risk of another continental price shock. Europe’s dependence on LNG after cutting Russian pipeline supply means that attacks on South Pars-linked infrastructure in the Gulf do not stay regional for long.
India: paying for a war it did not choose
In India, the blowback is more than theoretical. Government sources told CNBC-TV18 that LPG supplies were already “feeling some heat” as the West Asia conflict disrupted shipping routes and pushed gas prices higher. The same report said Asian LNG prices had risen from about $6–8 per MMBtu to around $15 per MMBtu, while rerouting cargoes from alternative suppliers such as the United States or Norway would take longer. A later report said Indian LPG consumption fell 17.7% in the first half of March because of war-related supply disruption. That is what energy warfare looks like in human terms: shortages, higher costs and forced adjustment by people who had no role in launching the conflict.
China: tested, not insulated
China’s immediate exposure looks smaller on paper, but the same shock still hits Beijing’s energy calculus. Reuters reported that over 80% of Qatar’s LNG exports go to Asia, placing major buyers like China in the line of fire when Gulf supply is disrupted. Another report noted that China was among the key Asian markets exposed as the regional benchmark LNG price surged and traders sought replacement cargoes from farther afield. That leaves Beijing with more buffers than poorer importers, but not immunity from the price shock set off by attacks on Gulf gas infrastructure
WHEN A SHARED FIELD BECOMES A WAR ZONE
If the story stopped at Iran’s shoreline, it would already be devastating. But South Pars does not stop at Iran’s shoreline. The reservoir that feeds Assaluyeh stretches under the Gulf into Qatari waters, where it is known as the North Field and where it supplies Ras Laffan Industrial City, the most important LNG complex on Earth. Before the war, Ras Laffan’s trains exported around 77 million tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas, with plans underway to expand capacity towards 142 million tonnes by the end of the decade. Alongside LNG, Ras Laffan also produces Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), ethane, condensate and sulphur, and hosts gas‑to‑liquids plants, power stations and desalination units. It is a central hinge in the global energy system, and on the day Iran’s missiles arrived, workers there were told to leave the plant that underwrites their families’ incomes because someone else had decided their shared field was expendable.
Qatar understood immediately what an attack on South Pars meant. Its foreign ministry condemned the strikes as “dangerous and irresponsible,” explicitly reminding the world that the field is geologically continuous with the North Field and warning that targeting infrastructure tied to that reservoir threatens global energy security. It has now gone further, calling Iran’s strike on Ras Laffan a “brutal targeting” of its gas hub, invoking Security Council resolutions and asserting its right to respond under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The United Arab Emirates, normally cautious about public criticism of Israel, issued its own statement that attacks on energy facilities linked to Pars risk catastrophic consequences. Those are not sentimental reactions. They are the reflex of states that suddenly realised the line between “hitting Iran” and “putting our own energy spine in the crosshairs” had effectively vanished.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard then warned that key Gulf facilities had become “direct and legitimate targets” and urged workers to evacuate them before the strike. The list was specific: Ras Laffan; Mesaieed, Qatar’s original deep‑water export port and industrial hub, where gas and condensate are turned into NGLs, refined products, petrochemicals, aluminium and steel; Samref, a more‑than‑400,000‑barrels‑per‑day refinery in Yanbu on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast with around 13 million barrels of storage; Jubail, the giant refinery‑petrochemical complex in eastern Saudi Arabia running at roughly 440,000 barrels per day and anchored by a 1.5‑million‑tonne‑per‑year ethylene cracker; and Al Hosn in the UAE, a sour‑gas project that processes about a billion cubic feet per day of raw gas, produces roughly half a billion cubic feet per day of sales gas for the Emirati grid and throws off tens of thousands of barrels of condensate and thousands of tonnes of sulphur every day.
In Kuwait, drones struck individual units at the Mina al‑Ahmadi refinery and Mina Abdullah refinery, triggering “limited” fires and forcing operators to temporarily halt parts of their output. Further east, Abu Dhabi’s Habshan gas facilities, already singled out in Iranian warnings, were shut down after debris from intercepted missiles fell on the site, underscoring that Tehran was willing to hit the very installations that underpin its rivals’ domestic energy security.
In other words, Tehran not only threatened but executed multiple strikes, and in the Ras Laffan’s case, it appears the Islamic Republic have struck the same class of conversion assets on Arab shores that Israel and the U.S. had just targeted at Assaluyeh, the plants where raw hydrocarbons become electricity, heating, industrial feedstock and exportable product.
It is crucial to understand that Ras Laffan’s LNG trains, Mesaieed’s NGL and refining complex, Samref’s crude units, Jubail’s crude‑to‑chemicals expansion and Al Hosn’s gas and sulphur trains are all parts of the same nervous system.
When one side authorises attacks on conversion nodes at South Pars, the other side’s answer is not to keep politely to its own coastline. It is to declare that the Gulf’s entire energy architecture is now part of the battlefield.
That is the third truth this strike exposes: by hitting a shared field, Israel and the U.S. have made their own allies’ energy spines part of the target set.
THE ENERGY WAR NOBODY CAN HONESTLY CALL ‘DEFENSE’
Seen from this angle, the Assaluyeh strikes were not a self‑contained tactical move. They were the opening of a new kind of war, a war on conversion infrastructure, that punishes civilians first and drags allies and markets along for the ride. Israel hit the plant that turns Iran’s gas wealth into heat, light and wages; Iran responded in kind by putting the plants that turn Qatar’s, Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s hydrocarbons into LNG, petrol and plastics in its sights. Trump then raised the stakes by threatening to “entirely blow up” the shared reservoir that makes all of this possible, as if the energy backbone of two states and a sizeable slice of Europe and Asia’s gas supply were a pawn to be removed from the board to prove a point.
At that stage, the legal and moral mask slips. A campaign that begins as “precision strikes” against military and command targets turns, almost in slow motion, into an assault on the infrastructure that keeps tens of millions of people from freezing, blacking out or losing their jobs, and into a form of extortion against the wider Gulf. In other words, people of Iran are being asked to accept that Iran’s energy lifeline can be bombed with impunity, or watch their own refineries and LNG terminals burn.
Iranian analysts now call this openly what it is, “economic warfare” centered on energy, and warn that destroyed or degraded capacity will worsen electricity shortages and deepen domestic hardship. When the same government waging that campaign has senior officials on record saying the “imminent threat” used to sell the war does not exist as advertised, it becomes very hard to sustain the fiction that this is self‑defense in any meaningful sense.
A war waged under those conditions cannot be sold as “precision.” It can barely, if at all, be sold as self‑defense. What they are doing, in the cold light of Assaluyeh’s burning stacks and Ras Laffan’s flares, looks like a campaign of collective punishment enforced through the energy system of an entire region, and once you see it that way, it becomes very hard to unsee.
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