Israel was behind attacks on major gas pipelines in Iran, officials say
Israel this week carried out covert attacks on two major gas pipelines in Iran, disrupting the flow of heat and cooking gas to provinces with millions of people, according to two Western officials and a military strategist linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
The attacks represent a notable shift in the shadow war that Israel and Iran have been waging for years through air, land, sea and cyber attacks.
Israel has long attacked military and nuclear sites in Iran – and assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists and commanders – both inside and outside the country. Israel has also carried out cyberattacks to take down Oil Ministry servers, causing unrest at gas stations across the country.
But blowing up part of the country's energy infrastructure, which industries, factories and millions of citizens rely on, marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier, officials and analysts said.
“The enemy's plan was to completely disrupt the flow of gas to several major cities and provinces in our country in winter,” Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji told Iranian media on Friday.
Mr. Owji, who had previously called the blasts “sabotage and terrorist attacks,” stopped short of publicly blaming Israel or any other culprit. But he said the aim of the attack was to damage Iran's energy infrastructure and stoke domestic discontent.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office declined to comment.
The Western officials and the Iranian military strategist said Israel's attacks on the gas pipelines required deep knowledge of Iran's infrastructure and careful coordination, especially since two pipelines in multiple locations were hit at the same time.
One Western official called it a major symbolic attack that was relatively easy for Iran to repair and caused relatively little damage to civilians. But, the official said, there were strong warnings about the damage Israel could inflict as the conflict spreads across the Middle East and tensions rise between Iran and its adversaries, especially Israel and the United States.
Western officials said Israel also caused a separate explosion Thursday at a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran, roiling a neighborhood and sending plumes of smoke and fire into the air. But local officials said the factory explosion, which occurred Thursday, was the result of an accident in the factory's fuel tank.
Iran has said it does not want direct war with the United States, denying involvement in the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel or the various attacks on US and Israeli targets in the region since then.
But Iran supports and arms a network of proxy militias that have actively fought with Israel and the United States, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and militants in Iraq and Syria. Iran has also armed and trained Hamas and other Palestinian fighters.
Strikes and counterattacks across the region have escalated in recent months. Israel has killed two senior Iranian commanders in Syria, while the United States has attacked military bases linked to the Revolutionary Guards and its allies in Iraq and Syria after three US soldiers were killed in a drone strike.
Now, Western officials say, Israel has attacked inside Iran's borders with successive explosions that have unnerved the Iranians.
“This shows that the secret networks operating in Iran have expanded their target list and gone beyond military and nuclear sites,” said Shahin Modarres, a Rome-based security analyst who focuses on the Middle East. “It is a major challenge and reputational damage for Iran's intelligence and security services.”
The sabotage on Wednesday targeted several points along two key gas pipelines in the provinces of Fars and Chahar Mahal Bakhtiari. But according to Iranian officials and local media reports, the service disruption extended to residential homes, government buildings and major factories in at least five provinces in Iran.
The pipelines transport gas from the south to major cities such as Tehran and Isfahan. One of the pipelines runs all the way to Astara, a city near Iran's northern border with Azerbaijan.
Energy experts estimate that the attacks on the pipelines, each about 750 miles long and carrying 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, have knocked out about 15 percent of Iran's daily natural gas production, making these particularly drastic attacks on Iran economies. the country's critical infrastructure.
“The impact was very high because these are two important pipelines running from south to north,” said Homayoun Falakshahi, senior energy analyst at Kpler. “We have never seen anything like it in size and scope.”
On Friday, oil minister Owji said ministry technical teams had been working around the clock to repair the damage, that disruption had been minimal and services had been restored.
But his assessment conflicted with comments from local governors and officials from Iran's national gas company, who had described widespread service disruptions in five provinces, forcing the closure of government buildings. On social media, Iranian energy experts advised people in the affected areas, where in some places the temperature dropped below freezing, so you should dress warmly.
The blasts occurred around 1 a.m. local time, terrifying residents who fled their homes and took to the streets, according to Iranian media reports. On social media, people described explosions so loud they woke up and thought a bomb had fallen. No casualties have been reported.
Saeid Aghli, an official at the national gas company, told Iranian media that officials immediately convened an emergency meeting attended by the Oil Minister, Foreign Ministry officials and representatives of all Iranian intelligence and security services. Mr Aghli said the sabotage was intended to knock out about 40 percent of the country's gas transmission capacity.
How the pipelines were hit – with drones, explosives attached to pipelines or in some other way – remains unclear. Iran's energy infrastructure has been targeted in the past, but those incidents were much smaller in scale and scope, analysts said.
The military strategist attached to the Revolutionary Guards – who, like the other officials, was not authorized to speak publicly – said the Iranian government believed Israel was behind the attack due to the complexity and scale of the operation. The attack, he said, almost certainly required the help of collaborators in Iran to figure out where and how to strike.
He noted that major pipelines in Iran, which transport gas over vast distances including mountains, deserts and rural fields, are monitored by guards in outposts along the length of the pipelines. The guards check their area every few hours, he said, so the attackers may have been aware of their breaches while the area would remain unmanned.
Mr Falakshahi, the energy analyst, said the blasts exposed the vulnerability of the country's critical infrastructure to attack and sabotage. He said Iran, the world's third-largest producer of natural gas, has about 25,000 miles of natural gas pipelines, much of it underground. He added that the pipelines are primarily for domestic consumption and that Iranian gas exports were minimal and limited to Turkey and Iraq due to the sanctions.
“It is very difficult to protect this very extensive network of pipelines unless you invest billions in new technology,” Mr Falakshahi said. He added that repairing the damaged pipelines would require shutting off the gas and replacing the pipelines, which could take days.