Iran Says It Will Strike Oil Facilities, Undersea Cables and AI Datacentres Across the Gulf if Attacked
Tehran widens the target list
Iran says it will strike oil facilities, undersea cables, datacentres and AI facilities across as many as seven countries in the Gulf in the event of a fresh US-Israeli attack. The warning came from Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, who said the economic systems enabling strikes against Iran would not remain protected while Tehran's own economy suffered attacks.
"There can be no arrangement in which Iran's economic lifelines come under attack while the economic architecture enabling those attacks is considered untouched and immune," Rezaei said. He added that Iran has invested in distributed production, underground facilities and diversified launch systems, and warned: "We have not used all our capabilities."
"Zero red lines"
Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to parliamentary speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf, said Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed in principle on an attack but could not guarantee a successful outcome. "We see the next conflict as an existential threat. The third war in two years means a threat to existence. Our strategy is 'zero red lines'," Mohammadi said. "We break the temporal and spatial dimensions of the conflict. The war will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates."
The cable threat has been building all week. IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi warned on October 20 that seven major internet cables run beneath the Strait of Hormuz and could become targets, and Iranian television reported that seven oil tankers were attacked or struck naval mines in the strait overnight. US media reports say American military advisers have drawn up a detailed target list for a fresh joint US-Israel assault to be implemented after the November 3 midterm elections, while White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly has denied the United States would attack Iran before the midterms.
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Options market and stocks to watch
Oil is the first transmission channel: any move on Gulf energy infrastructure or the Strait of Hormuz reprices crude instantly, making the United States Oil Fund and the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund the cleanest public gauges of how much risk traders are paying for. The new element in this threat is digital infrastructure: undersea cables and Gulf datacentres underpin the region's cloud and AI buildout, so a conflict that touches them hits a much wider set of balance sheets than a traditional oil shock. Defense names such as Lockheed Martin remain the standard hedge expression. Watch crude positioning into the November 3 midterms, and follow the story on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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