Two senior Iranian security officials say Tehran would target subsea communications cables — and block their repair — if the United States and Israel attack again, widening a war that has already turned data centers into targets.
Published 24 October 2026 · 01:30 GMT
Two senior Iranian security officials say Tehran would target subsea communications cables — and block their repair — if the United States and Israel attack again, widening a war that has already turned data centers into targets. Two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters that Tehran has drawn up detailed plans to target undersea communications cables in the Gulf if the United States and Israel attack Iran again. The officials, speaking anonymously, said Iran would aim to prevent repairs after any attack to prolong disruptions to communications, including internet connections.
Tehran is explicitly threatening undersea communications cables in the Gulf as a response to any renewed U.S.–Israeli attack — stated on the record by IRGC officials on October 19 and 21, and described as “detailed plans” by two senior Iranian security officials speaking to Reuters on October 23. The doctrine includes preventing repairs to prolong disruption.
Whether the plans are real operational capability or deterrence theatre — Reuters’ anonymous sourcing is treated in the West as a credible signal of intent, while Tehran’s record of maximalist rhetoric invites the reading that the announcement itself is the weapon; relatedly, whether cutting cables that carry under 1% of global bandwidth is strategic leverage or a regionally self-harming escalation.
How or where Iran would strike the cables; which of the “seven major cables” are meant; whether Iran can actually interdict repair operations in patrolled Gulf waters; whether proxies such as the Houthis are part of the plan; and what Washington’s and the Gulf capitals’ real red lines are.
Tehran has drawn up detailed plans to target undersea communications cables in the Gulf if the United States and Israel attack Iran again, two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters in an exclusive report published on October 23, 2026. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, gave few details and did not say how or where exactly Tehran would carry out such attacks — but one of them said Iran would aim to prevent repairs after any attack, in order to prolong disruptions to communications, including internet connections.
“If Iran is attacked, there will be no more red lines ... from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones,” one of the officials said, warning Washington not to “play with fire” and asserting that Iran has full access to the undersea cables and could easily destroy them. Their comments followed a week of escalating Iranian warnings that subsea cables in the region could become targets in any renewed conflict if diplomacy with Washington collapses.
The U.S. Department of State and Iran’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the officials’ remarks. There was no immediate comment from Gulf states — the countries on whose seabed the threatened infrastructure lies.
The Reuters exclusive is the third Iranian cable warning in five days, and each layer adds specificity. On October 19, IRGC spokesman Brigadier-General Hossein Mohebbi, speaking at Tehran’s Sacred Defense Museum, drew attention to the seven major internet cables running beneath the Strait of Hormuz, declaring that “all of the world’s internet and commercial data depend on them” and warning that “new targets will be unveiled. New weapons will be unveiled” — remarks reported by Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency, citing Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB.
On Wednesday, October 21, Yadollah Javani, the deputy head of political affairs for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Iran could target those seven major internet cables beneath the strait if Iranian infrastructure came under attack. And Mohsen Rezaei, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned that a return to intense fighting could endanger critical technology infrastructure — including cables, data centers, and AI facilities.
What the anonymous officials added to Reuters is the one detail designed to frighten telecom planners: the plans are “detailed,” and the doctrine includes stopping repair crews — a deliberate bid to turn a temporary cut into a prolonged communications blackout. For the longer arc of this confrontation, see our Strait of Hormuz coverage and the Iran country file.
Almost everything operational remains unknown. The officials gave no account of how or where the attacks would be carried out — whether by naval divers, submersibles, seabed mines, or sabotage launched from ostensibly civilian vessels — and they did not name the cable systems involved. The “seven major cables” Javani cited have not been mapped to specific systems by Tehran.
Unknown too: whether Iran genuinely possesses the deep-water capability to cut cables and then interdict repair operations in the busy, shallow, heavily patrolled waters of the Gulf, or whether the claim is calibrated to deter without ever being tested. Whether proxy forces are part of the plan — notably the Houthis, who hold the coastline at Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea’s southern gate. What the United States’ and Israel’s actual red lines are, beyond President Trump’s October 22 hint that Washington “may do it a little bit further.” And what the Gulf capitals, whose territory hosts the landing stations, privately think — none has said a word.
Subsea cables carry around 99 percent of global internet traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency — the ocean floor is where the digital economy actually lives. But the geography is lopsided: less than 1 percent of international bandwidth passes through the Strait of Hormuz, TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin told Reuters, which means the global impact of cutting Gulf cables would be limited.
The regional impact would not be. The Gulf states host some of the world’s densest concentrations of data centers, financial hubs, and cable landing stations; a coordinated cut, paired with the repair-blocking doctrine Tehran describes, could isolate the region’s digital economy for weeks. Cable repair is a slow craft — a handful of specialized ships, booked months in advance, working in contested waters.
Because this war has already rewritten what counts as a target. On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain, with the IRGC claiming AWS hosted U.S. military AI — what analysts describe as the first deliberate state kinetic strike on commercial cloud infrastructure in history. The cables are the next logical rung on the same ladder: if the data centers can burn, the fiber that connects them can be cut.
There is a method to how Tehran is releasing this. The on-record statements — Mohebbi, Javani, Rezaei — name the target and the stakes; the anonymous officials add the one operational detail engineered to concentrate minds in every Gulf telecom ministry: no repairs. It is textbook deterrence — announce the capability, withhold the specifics, and let the adversary’s imagination do the heavy lifting.
The timing is equally deliberate. With the U.S. midterm elections on November 3 and oil trading above $117 a barrel, Tehran is raising the cost of the strike option Washington is openly weighing: Trump said on October 22 that the United States “may” start another military campaign against Iran, telling reporters “we’ve knocked the hell out of them.” The New York Times has reported that the U.S. and Israel are preparing new strikes for after the elections.
Leverage without firing a shot. A secret plan deters no one; a published one forces every Gulf capital, every insurer, and every telecom consortium to price in the risk — and to pressure Washington against escalation. It also answers the March-to-September arc of the infrastructure war on Tehran’s own terms: after drones proved data centers could burn and the supertanker was left ablaze under a U.S. blockade, cables complete the triptych of oil, cloud, and connectivity. The question Tehran wants asked in every Gulf capital is not whether the plans exist, but whether anyone can afford to find out. For the threats already on record, see the Iranian defence minister’s earlier warnings.
If the threat is even partly credible, the second-order machinery is already moving: telecom consortia reassessing route diversity, war-risk insurers repricing Gulf exposure, and cable-ship operators watching a repair fleet that cannot be in two places at once. Gulf regulators will quietly harden landing stations — the fixed, undefended doors through which the global network enters each country.
The deeper hinge sits further west. More than 90 percent of data capacity between Europe and Asia passes through subsea fiber-optic cables running beneath the Red Sea, according to telecom analytics cited in regional reporting — and the Iran-backed Houthis control key coastal areas at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Red Sea’s southern entrance. Tehran has not named that pressure point in this week’s warnings. It has not needed to.
Badly, and slowly. Traffic could shift to terrestrial links, Red Sea routes, or satellite — but satellite capacity is a fraction of fiber’s, and every alternative runs through the same contested geography. The March AWS strikes already rewrote the risk models once: in September, AWS told customers it could not restore resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region — entire datasets gone for good. When the cloud itself can be written off, the cables that feed it become the decisive target, and the insurers know it.
Watch the diplomacy window first: the officials conditioned the threat on renewed attack and the collapse of talks with Washington — for as long as negotiations are described as “productive,” the plans stay on paper. Watch the water: Iranian naval movements near cable corridors, the positioning of cable-repair vessels, and any harassment of survey ships would signal a shift from rhetoric to preparation.
Watch the Gulf capitals for the statements they have not made: a joint telecom-security posture, or a quiet surge in landing-station protection, would show they take the threat seriously. And watch the calendar. November 3 is when the American electoral constraint on escalation lifts — and when Tehran’s leverage, priced for maximum effect this week, comes due. Until then, the message stands as issued: detailed plans, unnamed, undated, and pointed at the one piece of infrastructure the entire region shares.
The Western wire frames this as a credible escalation signal: Reuters’ sourcing — two senior officials, on the record by the agency’s standards — is treated as evidence of intent, while the expert caveat is foregrounded. TeleGeography’s assessment that less than 1 percent of global bandwidth crosses Hormuz caps the doomsday reading, and the story’s news value is its specificity: detailed plans, plus a repair-blocking doctrine nobody had stated before. In this telling, the cable threat sits inside a week of Iranian escalation rhetoric — the IRGC’s ‘graveyard’ vow, a lawmaker’s call to permit nuclear weapons — and the question is capability, not messaging.
Eastern outlets carry the same wire but read it through the connectivity map. Singapore’s press and India’s Firstpost run the Reuters account while Asia counts its exposure: the region’s data, trade documentation, and financial flows ride the same seabed. Türkiye’s Anadolu, via Iran’s IRIB, supplies the other origin — Mohebbi’s October 19 remarks from Tehran — which Eastern coverage treats as the on-record anchor to Reuters’ anonymous sourcing.
From the Global South — and especially from Doha’s Al Jazeera, which has carried the war day by day — the story lands inside a war diary: Trump’s October 22 hint of new strikes, oil above $117 a barrel, a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, and Gulf states absorbing costs they did not choose. The southern reading notices the silence: no Gulf capital has commented on a threat aimed at infrastructure on its own seabed. And it notices the asymmetry: the states that host the landing stations and the cloud regions are not the states making the threats.
Iranian officials speak of seven major internet cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz, but Tehran has not named the systems. Industry analysts note that less than one percent of international bandwidth passes through the strait, so a cut would wound the Gulf region far more than the global internet. The real damage would come from Iran’s stated aim of blocking the specialized repair ships.
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain, knocking two of three UAE availability zones offline. The IRGC claimed AWS hosted U.S. military AI workloads. In September, AWS told customers it could not restore data held exclusively in its Bahrain region — the first time a state kinetic strike permanently erased commercial cloud infrastructure.
No — the global internet is designed to route around damage, and with under one percent of bandwidth crossing Hormuz, worldwide traffic would barely notice. The danger is regional: the Gulf’s banks, airlines, hospitals, and government services depend on those cables, and Iran says it would stop repair ships from fixing them. A cut that cannot be repaired becomes a siege, not an outage.
The threat is conditional: the officials tied it to renewed U.S. and Israeli strikes and the collapse of diplomacy. With Washington openly weighing another campaign and midterm elections constraining the calendar until November 3, Tehran is raising the price of escalation in advance. Naming the target now is deterrence — make the cost visible before anyone orders the strike.
Nothing — Reuters reported no immediate comment from any Gulf government, and neither the U.S. State Department nor Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded. The silence is itself a signal: the threatened infrastructure sits on their seabed. Behind it, quiet hardening is underway — Saudi Aramco says oil volumes bypassing Hormuz via pipeline have more than tripled, from two to seven million barrels a day.
