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Iran has a drinking water crisis. And the war with the U.S. is making matters worse for Iran—and the entire Gulf region. That’s in part because of threats not only to water infrastructure, including dams and reservoirs, but also to desalination facilities, which millions in the broader region depend on for their drinking water.

For years, Iran’s reserves of potable water have been dwindling, thanks to a combination of climate change, mismanagement, and infrastructure problems. But the war has also put desalination—something that most of Iran isn’t reliant on—in the spotlight.

In March, Iran accused the U.S. of an attack on an Iranian desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. denied responsibility for the strike, and just a day later, officials in Bahrain, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, accused Iran of damaging one of Bahrain’s desalination plants. By April, at least two desalination plants in Kuwait, another U.S. ally, had also been attacked.

Desalination plants are a critical resource—they convert seawater to drinking water. Around 70 to 90 percent of the population in most countries in the Persian Gulf region relies on desalination for drinking water, says Chris Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah and author of the forthcoming book Saltwater Kingdoms. Targeting desalination plants is likely a war crime under international law because they are civilian infrastructure, he adds.

Direct attacks aren’t the only threat to the region’s drinking water, however. Hits to energy infrastructure by U.S.-Israeli and Iranian forces have sent untold amounts of oil into the Persian Gulf—enough for the spills to be visible from space—which risks clogging up desalination pipes and fouling filters, Low says. Radioactive waste from damaged nuclear facilities could further contaminate the water, too.

Smaller countries in the region, such as Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, are “exquisitely vulnerable,” Low says. “They only have a few days to a week, let’s say, of reserve capacity. There’s not much slack in the system.”

To understand how the war is affecting the region’s drinking water, Scientific American spoke with Low about how the conflict could spiral into a “long-term ecological disaster.”

How many people are dependent on desalination in the Persian Gulf region?

If we think about the Gulf as a relatively cohesive region, [there are] 60-million-plus people who are dependent in some way, shape or form on desalination.

If you break out desalination dependency for drinking water by country, you get Qatar somewhere around 99 percent—it’s completely dependent. Kuwait and Bahrain: 90-plus percent. Oman: 86 percent. Saudi Arabia: 70 percent. United Arab Emirates, the number comes in at 42 percent.

If we were to turn off the tap of the Jebel Ali plant in Dubai, [UAE], Dubai would not fare well. If we were to turn off access to the Al Taweelah plant in Abu Dhabi—it’s deeply dependent.

All of those major population centers—those skyscraper, glittering cities, they all are attached to very significant desalination facilities.

What about Iran? Is it reliant upon desalination?

No—that’s a key difference. Its desalination capacity only accounts for 3 percent of its water needs.

If you looked outside my window [in Salt Lake City] and see snowcapped mountains, that looks like Tehran. It’s a very similar kind of landscape. Snowmelt, rivers, dams, lakes—these are things that are not present in the Gulf. Iran has a much different ecological landscape as opposed to Gulf nations.

Now, Iran, of course, is acutely vulnerable to water risks. In 2025, President [Masoud] Pezeshkian announced that Iran was considering moving its administrative capital from Tehran to the southern coast, the Makran region, in part because the water is running out.

Have desalination plants come under attack in previous conflicts?

In the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq were at war, there emerged something called the tanker war. They basically started to fire on oil and commercial vessels with flags related to the other country.

The second, and I think most severe, issue related to desalination was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990–91. When Saddam Hussein and Iraq occupied Kuwait, and the U.S. and coalition forces came in, what Hussein did was basically unfurl a kind of program of ecological terror.

They sabotaged power plants, desalination plants. They set the oil wells—some 700-plus oil wells—on fire, and they intentionally spilled oil into the Gulf. They basically just wrecked Kuwait’s environment, not just in the short term but for many, many years into the future.

It took weeks, if not months, to get water supply back on. In the interim, you had water tankers and water trucks coming from Saudi Arabia, bottled water from as far away as Turkey, [and] U.S. and European support for mobile diesel units and generators.

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