Iran has drawn up plans to cut the Gulf undersea internet cables if America and Israel attack again, officials tell Reuters

Iran’s threats against the Gulf widened this week from airports and pipelines to the cables on the seabed. 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, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave Reuters few details on how or where the attacks would be carried out. One of them said Iran would also aim to prevent repairs after any attack, to prolong disruption to communications and internet connections.

“If Iran is attacked, there will be no more red lines, from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones,” one official said. He warned Washington not to play with fire and said Iran has full access to the cables and could destroy them easily.

The public version of the threat came on Wednesday from Yadollah Javani, the deputy head of political affairs for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Javani said Iran could target seven major internet cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz if Iranian infrastructure came under attack. Senior security official Mohsen Rezaei has separately warned that American linked digital infrastructure across the Gulf, including data centers and artificial intelligence facilities, could be targeted in a renewed war.

Undersea cables carry about 99 percent of global internet traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union. The practical reach of an attack in the strait is narrower than that figure suggests. Alan Mauldin, research director at the telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, told Reuters that less than 1 percent of international bandwidth passes through the Strait of Hormuz, so cuts there would hit Gulf connectivity and Gulf banking and cloud services hardest, rather than break the wider internet. Repairing a cable in wartime is slow work in any case. Insurers, permits and repair ships can take weeks to assemble, which is why a plan to block repairs matters.

The American State Department and Iran’s foreign ministry did not respond to Reuters requests for comment, and no Gulf government commented immediately. Iranian officials have also pressed a political argument alongside the threat, telling Gulf governments that they should hold Washington, not Tehran, responsible for any damage to cables and regional infrastructure if the war resumes.