Just when the US-Israeli war on Iran looked like it couldn’t get any more awkward, even Donald Trump has been left dismayed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s targeting of Iranian gas fields. Why?
Well, it is because Netanyahu, who is under indictment for crimes against humanity for his campaign in Gaza, has copied the tactics of Vladimir Putin, who himself is under indictment for alleged crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
On 5 December last year the British government, along with 42 other countries, said Russia was deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in what may constitute war crimes.
“The unlawful targeting of civilians and civilian objects is a breach of international humanitarian law, in particular principle of distinction, enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, and may therefore constitute war crimes,” Neil Holland, the UK representative to the OSCE said in Vienna.
“Russia’s deliberate missile and drone strikes against Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure constitute a clear pattern in its full-scale invasion that began in 2022 and has intensified in the fourth year of the war. Russia has carried out deliberate strikes across the country, leading to significant civilian casualties, massive damage to residential and energy infrastructure and causing emergency power outages across most regions of the country. Tens of thousands of civilians in major cities and population centres are left without proper access to essential services,” he said.
Israel has done exactly the same to Iran. It is trying to provoke regime change by shattering the nation’s industrial capacity and breaking its energy infrastructure.
Iran’s South Pars gas field provides at least 75 per cent of the country’s gas. Some 80 per cent of Iran’s electricity is generated by its natural gas supplies.
On Wednesday, Israel bombed South Pars and set its tanks ablaze. Iran retaliated by hitting the Ras Laffan industrial city in Qatar, the world’s largest LNG export hub.
South Pars, which is jointly owned by Iran and Qatar, is the largest gas field on earth. It is the source of Qatar’s wealth. Qatar hosts the US Al Udeid airbase, America’s largest in the Middle East from which attacks on Iran are coordinated and launched.
Trump does not care about human rights and alleged war crimes. He consistently takes Putin’s side over Ukraine and has been a staunch, uncritical ally of Netanyahu’s far-right government during its campaign against Gaza and its ongoing annexation of Palestinian land on the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
But he has to care deeply about the price of petrol in America and gas around the world.
In Europe, natural gas prices surged by 20 per cent after the Iranian attack on Ras Laffan.
Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, came close to apologising to Iran and admonishing Israel for the escalation.
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit,” he wrote. “The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL.”
He went on to warn that if Iran attacks the Qatari part of the gas field again, the US will “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before”.
“I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so,” he added.
Iran did attack again.
The US was clearly not consulted about Israel’s initial attack on Iran’s gas supplies.
Given that the Trump administration has no definition of what victory looks like in Iran and no plan for how to achieve it, this may not have made any difference, in the moment.
But the effects on global fossil fuel prices will further threaten to hobble economies from Asia to the Americas and offer only Putin a lottery win of unplanned financial windfalls. Moscow’s oil sales have already generated up to $10bn (£7.5bn) in extra revenues for his war in Ukraine, according to Volodymyr Zelensky.
At today’s prices, Russia will be enjoying an extra €2-4bn (£1.7-3.5bn) in gas revenues annually from exports to the European Union alone. Globally, over a year, the figure could be an extra €8-16bn for the Kremlin, based on our analysis of figures from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Putin’s profits don’t worry Trump.
But they are yet another reason why Europeans have an incentive to keep out of Israel and America’s war of choice against Iran.
None have, so far, condemned Israel’s attacks on Iran’s energy systems, which are, by their own definition last December, possible war crimes.
Their calculation is that the war itself is illegal. They will also be looking at the results of Putin’s alleged crimes of attacking Ukraine’s energy systems over the last four years and especially over last winter.
Netanyahu does not appear to have noticed that Ukraine’s population did not rise against Zelensky but hardened its hatred of all things Russian. Russia is now on the back foot on the battlefields of the Donbas.
There is no sign that bullying Ukrainians broke their spirit and there is no sign that Iranians will rise against the theocracy that has violently oppressed them while Israel is cutting the fuel for their daily lives.
.jpg?width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Fifa denies Iran’s World Cup request and won’t act on Israel complaint – UK Times")