U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the country’s desalination plants. Such a move — and Iran’s possible targeting of the plants of its Gulf Arab neighbors — could have devastating impacts across the water-starved Middle East.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said if a deal to end the war isn’t reached “shortly” and the Strait of Hormuzwhere much oil passes via tankers, is not immediately reopened, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

The biggest danger, analysts warn, may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate. Iran relies on desalination for a small share of its water supply while Gulf Arab states depend on it for the vast majority.

Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities — such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates or Doha, Qatar’s capital — could not sustain their current populations.

“Desalination facilities are oftentimes necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” said Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

While less reliant on desalination, Iran’s water situation is dire

After a fifth year of extreme drought, some Iranian media reports say reservoirs supplying Tehran, the country’s capital, are below 10% capacity. Satellite pictures analyzed by The Associated Press also show reservoirs noticeably depleted. The country still draws most of its water from rivers, reservoirs and depleted underground aquifers.

Israeli airstrikes on March 7 on oil depots surrounding Tehran produced heavy smoke and acid rain. Experts warned the fallout could contaminate soil and parts of the city’s water supply.

“Attacking water facilities, even one, could end up being harmful to the population in such a severe water scarcity context,” Jafarnia said.

Before the war that Israel and the United States launched on Feb. 28, Iran had been racing to expand desalination along its southern coast and pump some of the water inland, but infrastructure constraints, energy costs and international sanctions have sharply limited scalability.

Across the Gulf, many desalination plants are tied to power stations

In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

Even where the plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s an asymmetrical tactic,” he said. “Iran doesn’t have the same capacity to strike back … But it does have this possibility to impose costs on the Gulf countries to push them to intervene or call for a cessation of hostilities.”

Desalination plants have multiple stages — intake systems, treatment facilities, energy supplies — and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production, according to Ed Cullinane, Mideast editor at Global Water Intelligence, a publisher serving the water industry.

“None of these assets are any more protected than any of the municipal areas that are currently being hit by ballistic missiles or drones,” Cullinane said.

The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies. Fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill.

“Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers,” said Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. “It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”

Trump’s comments came as the conflict intensified, with Tehran striking a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait and an oil refinery in Israel coming under attack, while U.S. and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes on Iran.

US and Gulf governments have long recognized the risk

A 2010 CIA analysis warned that attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states, and prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed. More than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants, the report stated, and “each of these critical plants is extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested in pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies designed to cushion short-term disruptions. But smaller states such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have fewer backup supplies.

Desalination has expanded in part because climate change is intensifying drought across the region. The plants themselves are highly energy-intensive and emit massive amounts of carbon, while their coastal locations make them vulnerable to extreme weather and rising seas.

Past Mideast conflicts have seen attacks on desalination plants

During Iraq’s 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait, retreating Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities, said Low, from the University of Utah, while millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Persian Gulf, which threatened seawater intake pipes used by desalination plants across the region.

Workers rushed to deploy protective booms around the intake valves of major facilities but the destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took years.

In recent years, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities as tensions escalated.

International humanitarian law, including provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities.

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Toward the end of Monday’s briefing, a reporter reminded White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt that Pope Leo XIVin remarks delivered on Palm Sunday, said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Citing a Bible passage, the pontiff added, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.”

Asked for her reaction, Leavitt replied“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our military leaders or with the president calling on the American people to pray for our service members and those who are serving our country overseas.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that no prominent political figures have argued there is something wrong with praying for service members. But the other element to this is some are going far further than simply calling on the public to pray for U.S. troops.

Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example. The Washington Post reported earlier this week:

[L]ongtime norms are being upended by the proselytizing Christian campaign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, say multiple former high-ranking military officials and experts on religion and law. Rather than boosting cohesion through a more universal spiritual uplift, they say, the new approach violates the Constitution and undermines the bonds of mutual respect between troops that are essential, especially in wartime.

The scope of the beleaguered Pentagon chief’s embrace of Christian nationalism is quite broad. In recent months, Hegseth has:

• led Christian prayer services in the Pentagon’s auditorium;
• invited radical Christian nationalist figures to speak at official prayer services;
• used social media to promote messages that suggest his faith should dominate over other religious traditions; and
• argued during an official press briefing that Americans should take a knee and pray “in the name of Jesus Christ,” at the same briefing in which he quoted Scripture.

At an event last week, Hegseth took matters to a new level when he prayed for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

In case this isn’t obvious, Hegseth is as free as every other American to worship, or not, as he pleases. His religiosity is his own business.

But as has become clear in recent weeks, the defense secretary isn’t just exercising his faith in line with his conscience, he’s also erasing the First Amendment’s church-state line and incorporating Christian nationalism into his wartime message in ways without precedent in the American tradition.

Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during Powell’s tenures as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, told the Post, “The American military has had a remarkable ride of equanimity and fairness and justice and all manner of good adjectives with regard to religion. It’s done this in a way that’s really remarkable — until now.”

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had a related report this week:

If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of biblical law — the highest authority of all — then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy — who cry out to God but, unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him — are affirmatively good.

‘It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God — a religious person — should think,’ [Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona]who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, ‘is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.’ If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll ‘start to lose ourselves.’

Looking ahead, there are limited options to curtail the defense secretary’s public advocacy of Christian nationalism — Donald Trump could intervene, though that seems exceedingly unlikely — but Hegseth’s critics are not powerless. On the contrary, some of the Pentagon chief’s policies related to religious promotion have already sparked litigationwhich opens the door to possible court-imposed limits. Watch this space.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”