TARGETING WATER IN WAR

water under fire

The 2026
Iran Conflict

water
under
fire

The 2026 Iran Conflict

26.80°N, 57.03°E — Kuhestak, Hormozgan
Iran, whole-country locator
Iran
Hormozgan province county boundaries Ten villages cut off from one destroyed water source, approximate location within Hormozgan

In the early hours of 10 June 2026, two drinking water reservoirs in Bemani district, Sirik County – a remote stretch of Iran’s Hormozgan province – were destroyed. Analysis of satellite imagery and munitions remnants identified a US-made GBU-39 precision bomb. Iran filed formal war crime cases in both domestic and international judicial bodies. The United States had not officially acknowledged the strike.

The region's temperatures routinely exceed 45°C

Water for more than 20,000 residents cut off

Strike impacted 10 surrounding villages

It was not the first time water had entered the crossfire. The conflict, which began on 28 February 2026, had drawn water infrastructure into its logic from almost the very start.

A Timeline of Attacks

Iran accuses the United States of striking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi states the attack disrupted water supply to 30 villages, warning: "Attacking Iran's infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran." The US and Israel deny the attack.

Iran retaliates: a drone strike damages a desalination plant in Bahrain. Bahrain condemns the strike as an attack on civilian infrastructure.

Iranian military spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari warns that if Iran's fuel and energy infrastructure is attacked, "all energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities belonging to the US and the regime in the region will be targeted." Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf separately warns of "relentless attacks" on all vital infrastructure of countries in the region.

Two drinking water reservoirs in Bemani, Hormozgan, are destroyed. Iran's state broadcaster attributes the strike to the US military. Legal experts and satellite analysis suggest a precision strike, with former US State Department lawyer Brian Finucane stating: "It's either a military objective or it's a civilian object - attacking one is lawful, attacking the other is a war crime."

Gulf Cooperation Council — desalination dependency
GCC desalination dependency, by country Schematic regional map, not a survey-grade coastline. Qatar 99%, Bahrain over 90%, Kuwait/Oman/Saudi Arabia 70-90% reliant on desalinated water for drinking supply. PERSIAN GULF KUWAIT 70–90% BAHRAIN 90%+ QATAR 99% UAE 90% OMAN 70–90% SAUDI ARABIA 70–90%

The stakes are enormous. The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – operate over 3,400 desalination plants collectively producing 22.67 million cubic metres of water per day, representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water from desalination; Bahrain over 90 percent; Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia between 70 and 90 percent. As the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick noted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a 1983 CIA assessment had already warned that disruption of Gulf desalination facilities “could have more serious consequences than the loss of any other industry or commodity.” That warning has never been more relevant.

Water as a Weapon: A Historical Pattern

The weaponisation of water infrastructure is not a new phenomenon. Across centuries of conflict, the destruction of dams, dikes, and water systems has served as a tool of war - and almost invariably, it is civilians who bear the greatest cost.

hover on images

  • On the night of 16-17 May 1943, Britain's RAF 617 Squadron carried out Operation Chastise - the famous "Dambusters" raid - deploying bouncing bombs designed by Barnes Wallis to breach the Möhne and Eder dams in Germany's Ruhr valley. The Möhne breach sent catastrophic flooding through the valley; the Sorpe dam sustained only minor damage. An estimated 1,600 civilians were killed - roughly 600 Germans and approximately 1,000 enslaved labourers, predominantly Soviet prisoners of war. Factories, mines, and two hydroelectric stations were destroyed, and industrial production was disrupted until September 1943. The raid is frequently cited in IHL commentary as precisely the kind of attack that later codified law - particularly Article 56 of Additional Protocol I - was designed to prohibit.
  • In June 1938, Chinese Nationalist forces breached the Yellow River dikes at Huayuankou, Henan, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The intention was to use floodwaters as a substitute for soldiers - a scorched-earth barrier to slow the Japanese advance. The immediate drowning deaths numbered between 30,000 and 89,000. Accounting for famine and plague in the inundation's aftermath, total civilian deaths reached between 400,000 and 500,000. Five million people lived on flooded land for nearly a decade until the dikes were repaired in January 1947. The strategic gain was temporary; the civilian cost was catastrophic and permanent.
  • During the Gulf War, Iraqi forces deliberately destroyed much of Kuwait's desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardising the seawater intakes of plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. After liberation, Kuwait was forced to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of trucks to supply its population. Coalition forces also targeted Iraq's electrical grid - on which water treatment depended - with consequences that extended far beyond the battlefield. The pattern of infrastructure destruction leading to cascading civilian harm through waterborne disease became a defining feature of the conflict's humanitarian toll.
  • On 6 June 2023, the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River - under Russian military control - was breached. The dam was 30 metres tall and 3.2 kilometres long; the breach segment was approximately 85 metres. Flooding submerged 620 square kilometres across four oblasts. Russian authorities officially reported 59 deaths; local health workers and a volunteer grave digger from Oleshky told the Associated Press the death toll in that city alone was in the hundreds, with reporting suppressed by police and bodies relocated. Most experts concluded that Russian forces most likely destroyed the dam to hinder Ukraine's planned counteroffensive. Ukraine referred the case to the International Criminal Court, characterising the dam as a civilian object containing dangerous forces.
  • Syria became a laboratory for water weaponisation. UNICEF documented that in Aleppo City in the summer of 2015, opposition groups cut the water supply more than 40 times, depriving approximately 1.5 million people of running water. ISIS at one point controlled roughly 60 percent of Syria's fresh and drinking water resources through seizure of the Tabqa and Tishrin dams. Government and allied strikes damaged the al-Khafsa water station - the main source for over 3.5 million people in the Aleppo region - causing months-long outages. Water was weaponised by all sides, with devastating public health consequences.

    • The Scale of Destruction: What Dam Failures Actually Mean

    To understand why international law treats attacks on dams with particular gravity, it is necessary to reckon with what dam failures - deliberate or otherwise - actually produce. The numbers are staggering.

    In August 1975, Typhoon Nina triggered the collapse of the Banqiao Dam and 61 others across Henan province, China. The failure affected 12,000 square kilometres and a total population of 10.15 million people. Death toll estimates range from 26,000 to 240,000. Five to 6.8 million houses collapsed. The disaster - one of the deadliest structural failures in recorded history - was concealed by the Chinese government until the 1990s. Banqiao was not a targeted attack, but it establishes an unambiguous baseline: when a major dam fails, the immediate zone of devastation can encompass millions of people, and deaths from disease and starvation in the aftermath dwarf those from the initial flood.

    Iraq's Mosul Dam - one of the largest in the Arab world, rising 113 metres above the Tigris River - sits atop a geological foundation of soluble gypsum that has been dissolving since the reservoir first filled. The US Army Corps of Engineers called it "the most dangerous dam in the world" in 2006. Seepage was measured at 800 litres per second within a year of filling; sinkholes have repeatedly opened downstream. The dam has required continuous, nonstop grouting - injecting cement into the dissolving rock - since its construction in the 1980s.

    The consequences of failure would be immediate and catastrophic. According to the UN Development Programme's Emergency Preparedness Plan for Mosul Dam, a collapse would generate a tsunami wave 45 metres high, threatening the downstream population of Mosul city within two to four hours. Over 500,000 lives could be lost; Baghdad could be inundated by floodwaters up to eight metres high within 60 to 70 hours. A total of four to six million people live along the Tigris River floodplain in the path of such a flood.

    ISIS seized the dam briefly in 2014, raising fears of deliberate sabotage. Coalition forces moved assets out of the inundation area. The dam remains standing - but the precedent of a non-state armed group holding a structure whose deliberate destruction could kill hundreds of thousands illustrates exactly why Article 56 of Additional Protocol I exists.

    Unlike dams, desalination plants do not hold water behind them - but the populations that depend on them are no less vulnerable. The Arab Center Washington DC has documented that GCC states possess insufficient storage to buffer sustained supply disruptions. If major desalination complexes - some serving populations of one million or more - were struck and disabled, the humanitarian consequences would unfold within days, not weeks. Emergency responses involving water trucking and bottled water can serve as temporary bridges, but cannot replace the volume of a major plant. For Qatar and Bahrain in particular, which have virtually no alternative freshwater sources, the loss of desalination capacity would constitute an existential threat to civilian life.

    The Legal Framework

    International humanitarian law addresses the targeting of water infrastructure through two principal provisions of the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions - instruments that reflect the international community's recognition, after two world wars, that civilian survival cannot be separated from access to water.

    Objects Indispensable to Survival

    read →

    Works Containing Dangerous Forces

    read →

    Customary Law and the Rome Statute

    read →

    A Critical Gap

    read →
    Accountability and the Stakes

    The 2026 Iran conflict has brought the law of water in warfare into sharper focus than any conflict since the 1991 Gulf War.

    Explicit threats to destroy the desalination infrastructure upon which approximately 100 million people depend have been issued by parties to an active armed conflict - and, in the case of the Bemani reservoirs, precision strikes on civilian water infrastructure appear to have been carried out.

    Iran has initiated formal war crimes proceedings. The UN University's Middle East lead described attacks on desalination infrastructure as "absolutely a war crime." International legal experts invoked Article 54 and the prohibition on collective punishment.

    The pattern of action - and of impunity - mirrors what was documented in Gaza from October 2023, where the World Bank found that by August 2024, 84.6 percent of water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure had been destroyed or damaged.

    Water is not simply a resource at stake in these conflicts. Rather, it is the mechanism through which civilian populations can be made to suffer without the use of conventional military force against persons.

    The law is clear.

    What remains is the will — and the capacity — to enforce it.

    Join our mailing list!