Israel conducted clandestine strikes against two key natural gas pipelines in Iran this week, marking an escalation in the years-long standoff between the two states, the New York Times has reported.
“Israel has long targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran,” but this week’s attacks on the energy infrastructure “marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier,” the NYT wrote, citing Western officials.
The newspaper’s anonymous sources also attributed a separate incident to Israeli sabotage – an explosion that rocked a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran on Thursday, which local officials ruled an accident.
The two gas pipelines run for more than 1,000 kilometers and carry around 2 billion cubic feet (57 million cubic meters). The blasts temporarily took out around a sixth of Iran’s daily natural gas production, causing local outages.
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While Iran has said the damage was minor and the repairs were finished by Wednesday evening, the strikes were a “stark warning” of the kind of damage Israel could inflict, one of the NYT’s sources said. Given the vast distances and varied terrain the pipelines run, and the regular Iranian patrols, inside knowledge of the system would have been needed to carry out the sabotage, an Iranian official told the paper.
Recent strikes by Israel and the US have killed Iranian commanders in Syria and hit ‘Axis of Resistance’ targets in Iraq and Syria. The Axis of Resistance – composed of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis – is an unofficial coalition that opposes US and Israeli influence in the Middle East.
While Iran supports the Axis of Resistance, they have categorically denied any involvement with the events of October 7 – when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking another 240 hostage.