Israel Was Behind Attacks on MajorGas Pipelines in Iran, Officials Say

The sabotage,which analysts said marked an escalation in the shadow war between Israel andIran, caused sweeping disruption in several provinces.

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The sabotage targeted several points along twoof Iran’s main natural gas pipelines. At the site of one attack, in ChaharMahal Bakhtiari, two people stared at flames from the explosion. Credit...Reza Kamali Dehkordi/Fars NewsAgency, via Associated Press

By Farnaz Fassihi, Eric Schmitt, Ronen Bergman and Julian E. Barnes

Feb. 16, 2024

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Israel carriedout covert attacks on two major natural gas pipelines inside Iran this week,disrupting the flow of heat and cooking gas to provinces with millions ofpeople, according to two Western officials and a military strategist affiliatedwith Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The strikesrepresent a notable shift in the shadow war that Israel and Iran have been waging by air, land, sea andcyberattack for years.

Israel has longtargeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran — and assassinated Iraniannuclear scientists and commanders, both inside and outside of the country.Israel has also waged cyberattacks to disable servers belonging to the oilministry, causing turmoil at gas stations nationwide.

But blowing uppart of the country’s energy infrastructure, relied on by industries, factoriesand millions of civilians, marked an escalation in the covert war and appearedto open a new frontier, officials and analysts said.

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“The enemy’s planwas to completely disrupt the flow of gas in winter to several main cities andprovinces in our country,” Iran’s oil minister, Javad Owji, told Iranian mediaon Friday.

Mr. Owji, who hadpreviously referred to the blasts as “sabotage and terrorist attacks,” stoppedshort of publicly blaming Israel or any other culprit. But he said that thegoal of the attack was to damage Iran’s energy infrastructure and stir domesticdiscontent.

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Iran’s Minister of Petroleum Eng Javad Owjiarriving at the 8th OPEC International Seminar in Vienna, Austria, in July.Credit...Alex Halada/AgenceFrance-Presse — Getty Images

The office ofIsrael’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment.

The Westernofficials and the Iranian military strategist said the gas pipeline attacks byIsrael required deep knowledge of Iran’s infrastructure and carefulcoordination, especially since two pipelines were hit in multiple locations atthe same time.

One Westernofficial called it a major symbolic strike that was fairly easy for Iran torepair and caused relatively little harm to civilians. But, the official said,it sent a stark warning of the damage that Israel could inflict, as conflictspreads across the Middle East and tensions rise between Iran and itsadversaries, notably Israel and the United States.

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The Westernofficials said Israel also caused a separate blast on Thursday inside achemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran that rattled a neighborhood andsent plumes of smoke and fire into the air. But local officials said thefactory explosion, which took place on Thursday, stemmed from an accident inthe factory’s fuel tank.

Iran has said thatit does not want a direct war with the United States, and it has denied beinginvolved in either the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel or the variousattacks against American and Israeli targets in the region since then.

But Iran supportsand arms a network of proxy militia that have been actively fighting withIsrael and United States, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and militants in Iraq and Syria. Iran has also armed and trained Hamas and otherPalestinian fighters.

The strikes andcounter-strikes across the region have escalated in recent months. Israel haskilled two senior Iranian commanders in Syria, while the United States hasstruck military bases connected to the Revolutionary Guards and its proxies inIraq and Syria after three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack.

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Iran also sufferedone of the largest terrorist attacks in its history inJanuary, when suicide bombers killed about 100 people in Kerman during aceremony for a top general, Qassim Suleimani, killed by the United States fouryears ago. ISIS claimed responsibility for the suicide attack.

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Mourners in Tehran carried the flag-drapedcoffins of Iranian Revolutionary Guard members killed in an Israeli airstrikein Syria in January. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Now, the Westernofficials say, Israel has attacked inside Iran’s borders with back-to-backexplosions that have unnerved Iranians.

“This shows thatthe covert networks operating in Iran have expanded their target list andadvanced beyond just military and nuclear sites,” said Shahin Modarres, aRome-based security analyst focused on the Middle East. “It’s a major challengeand reputation blow for Iran’s intelligence and security agencies.”

The sabotagetargeted several points along two main gas pipelines in the provinces of Farsand Chahar Mahal Bakhtiari on Wednesday. But the disruption in servicestretched to residential homes, government buildings and major factories in atleast five provinces across Iran, according to Iranian officials and localmedia reports.

The pipelinescarry gas from the south to major cities like Tehran and Isfahan. One of thepipelines runs all the way to Astara, a city near Iran’s northern border withAzerbaijan.

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Energy expertsestimated that the attacks on the pipelines, which each run for about 1,200kilometers or 800 miles and carry 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day,knocked out about 15 percent of Iran’s daily natural gas production, makingthem particularly sweeping assaults on the country’s critical infrastructure.

“The level ofimpact was very high because these are two significant pipelines going south tonorth,” said Homayoun Falakshahi, a senior energy analyst at Kpler. “We havenever seen anything like this in scale and scope.”

On Friday, Mr.Owji, the oil minister, said that technical teams from the ministry had workedaround the clock to repair the damage, and that the disruption had been minimaland service restored.

But his assessmentwas at odds with the comments of local governors and officials from Iran’snational gas company, who had described widespread outages of service in fiveprovinces, forcing the closure of government buildings. On social media, Iranian energy experts advised people in theaffected areas, where in some places temperatures dropped belowfreezing, to dress warmly.

The blastshappened at around 1 a.m. local time, terrifying residents, who fled theirhomes and poured into the streets, according to Iranian media reports. Onsocial media, people described blasts so loud that they woke up thinking a bombhad been dropped. No casualties were reported.

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Missiles and a giant flag in Tehran markingthe 45th anniversary of the Islamic revolution on Sunday. Attacks on two ofIran’s major gas pipelines Wednesday were a notable shift in the shadow warlong waged by Iran and Israel, analysts said. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The NewYork Times

Saeid Aghli, anofficial with the national gas company, told Iranian media that officialsimmediately called an emergency meeting attended by the oil minister, officialsfrom the foreign ministry and representatives from all of Iran’s intelligenceand security services. Mr. Aghli said the sabotage was intended to take outabout 40 percent of the country’s gas transmission capacity.

How the pipelineswere struck — with drones, explosives attached to pipes or some other means —remains unclear. Iran’s energy infrastructure has been targeted in the past,but those incidents were much smaller in scope and scale, analysts said.

The militarystrategist affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards Corps — who, like the otherofficials, was not authorized to speak publicly — said the Iranian governmentbelieved Israel was behind the attack because of the complexity and scope ofthe operation. The attack, he said, almost certainly required the help ofcollaborators inside Iran to figure out where and how to strike.

He noted thatmajor pipelines in Iran, which carry gas across vast distances that includemountains, deserts and rural fields, are patrolled by guards in outposts alongthe length of the pipes. The guards check their areas every few hours, he said,so the attackers may have had knowledge of their breaks, when the area wouldremain unmanned.

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Mr. Falakshahi,the energy analyst, said the blasts exposed the vulnerability of the country’scritical infrastructure to attacks and sabotage. He said that Iran, the thirdlargest producer of natural gas in the world, has about 40,000 kilometers ofnatural gas pipelines, mostly underground. He added that the pipelines areprimarily for domestic consumption and that, because of sanctions, Iran’sexport of gas was minimal and limited to Turkey and Iraq.

“It’s verydifficult to protect this very extensive network of pipelines unless you investbillions in new technology,” Mr. Falakshahi said. He added that repairing thedamaged pipelines would require shutting off the gas and then replacing thepipes, which could take days.