Democracy Dies with Dictatorship
NY Times
Apr 8, 2026
Iran War Live Updates: Fragile Cease-Fire Takes Hold as Both Sides Claim Victory
Global relief at the pause in fighting was tempered by uncertainty over what happens next. Israel declared its support for the two-week truce between the U.S. and Iran, but said it did not include its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Updated
April 8, 2026, 6:04 a.m. ET25 minutes ago
Ravi MattuAdam RasgonYeganeh Torbati and Francesca Regalado
Here’s the latest
The United States and Iran announced a two-week cease-fire and plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday evening, hours before President Trump had threatened that Iran would see its “whole civilization” destroyed if it did not allow free transit through the vital waterway.
The agreement that was brokered by Pakistan was hailed as a victory by both countries. Mr. Trump said a 10-point plan from Iran was a “workable basis on which to negotiate” a lasting end to the war after demanding Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” for weeks. Iranian officials were triumphant, with Mohammad Reza Aref, the country’s first vice president, saying on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun after Trump failed to destroy the Islamic republic’s government. Iran also said it would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and natural gas shipments, while negotiations take place to secure a permanent deal.
In Lebanon, the Israeli military said that the cease-fire did not cover its offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon. It was also unclear whether word of the nascent deal had reached Iranian local commanders, as fresh Iranian attacks were reported in some Persian Gulf countries early Wednesday morning.
Investors welcomed the cease-fire after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran caused an energy crisis and weeks of turmoil for global markets. The price of oil tumbled, with Brent Crude, the international benchmark, down almost 15 percent to trade at about $95 a barrel, and global stock markets soaring.
Global relief at the pause in fighting was tempered by confusion over what comes next. Many challenges remain if the United States and Iran are to achieve a permanent deal to end the war, especially given that both seem to be claiming to have achieved their goals. Shipping companies also signaled that they were cautious about resuming transit through the Strait of Hormuz immediately. And restarting operations at refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields that have been damaged in the war will take time.
After Mr. Trump said on Tuesday night that he had agreed to the cease-fire proposed by Pakistan, a U.S. official said American military strikes against Iran had stopped. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the country’s armed forces would “cease their defensive operation” and that safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible for two weeks if it was coordinated with Iran’s military.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were scheduled to hold a news conference at the Pentagon at 8 a.m. Eastern.
Nima, a Tehran resident, said that Wednesday morning was the first time in around 40 days that he was not worried his colleagues might be killed in an airstrike. It was a good feeling, he said — the latest in a swirl of emotions that Iranians like him experienced while waiting to see what would come of President Trump’s threat to wipe out their civilization and reports of a flurry of negotiations to pause the war.
“Last night was a really frightening evening,” he said, declining to be fully named for fear of government reprisal. He opposed the war, and worried about what might come next for the country given the damage Iran had sustained to its infrastructure and key economic players.” Economically speaking, the country has seen a lot of damage,” he said. “The country is truly poor.”
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Lebanon: The Israeli military continued attacking Lebanon on Wednesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the cease-fire did not cover its offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Netanyahu’s assertion contradicted a statement by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, who had said that the deal between the United States and Iran also applied to Lebanon.
Israel: Israel said it backed the cease-fire deal between the United States and Iran, but critics of Mr. Netanyahu said it was “a disastrous disaster” and accused the Israeli leader of failing to achieve his stated war goal of destroying Iran’s theocratic government.
Persian Gulf: Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates reported missile and drone attacks early Wednesday morning. Bahrain’s interior ministry sounded warning sirens and reported a fire started by an Iranian attack.
Pakistan: Prime Minister Sharif of Pakistan said he had invited U.S. and Iranian delegations for talks in Islamabad on Friday, and Iran’s National Security Council said in a statement that Iran would attend. The United States said that it was in discussions about holding in-person talks with Iran but that “nothing is final” until it is announced by the president or the White House.
Markets respond: Stocks in Europe soared after markets rose sharply in Asia, where countries rely on imports of gas and oil from the Middle East. S&P 500 stock futures were up, pointing to a possible strong open when stock markets open in the United States.
A timeline: The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran raged for more than five weeks before a cease-fire was announced on the 39th day. It was the second time in less than a year that President Trump directly involved the United States in a military conflict with Tehran. Read through some of the key moments of the war so far here.
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,665 civilians, including 244 children, had been killed in Iran as of Monday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Monday said that more than 1,500 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. In attacks blamed on Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. In Israel, at least 20 people had been killed as of Monday. The American death toll stands at 13 service members, with hundreds of others wounded.
April 8, 2026, 6:22 a.m. ET7 minutes ago
Hwaida Saad, Dayana Iwaza and Sarah Chaito
The Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, has been speaking with regional counterparts “to ensure Lebanon gets its chance at a ceasefire,” according to a statement from Elias Bou Saab, deputy speaker of the country’s parliament.
April 8, 2026, 6:19 a.m. ET10 minutes ago
Reporting from Beijing
Iran’s ambassador to China, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, called at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday for China, Russia and the United Nations to provide security guarantees for his country. Iran has made similar suggestions in the past, and they have not prompted China or Russia to act.
A Chinese foreign minstry spokeswoman was noncommittal when asked whether the country might provide such a guarantee. “We hope that all parties will resolve their disputes through dialogue and negotiation,” Mao Ning said at the ministry’s daily briefing.
April 8, 2026, 6:17 a.m. ET12 minutes ago
Reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Whether or not the cease-fire holds, Gulf countries face a new reality
With a fragile cease-fire announced between the United States and Iran, leaders in Persian Gulf countries are grappling with a troubling new reality.
Politicians, investors and residents in wealthy cities like Dubai and Doha once believed they were essentially immune to the region’s conflicts. The American-Israeli war with Iran has smashed that assumption.
Gulf countries must repair the damage caused by thousands of Iranian missiles and drones. Most expect their economic output to shrink this year because of disruptions to their energy exports.
But they are also being forced to re-evaluate their relationships with Israel, Iran and the United States — their main security guarantor — now that the war has exposed the vulnerability of their oil fields, water desalination plants, hotels and airports.
“All that we have with the U.S. today does not provide the guarantee we need now,” said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, a think tank in Saudi Arabia. “Will that stop any attack against us? No.”
Governments wishing for a viable alternative guarantor, however, may find that there is none. And if the cease-fire becomes a more durable end to the war, they could be left to face a weakened Iran that can still periodically attack them.
“This idea that you’re going to be left with a bruised, battered, angry but emboldened Iran — I think that’s a real concern,” said Dina Esfandiary, the Middle East geoeconomics lead for Bloomberg Economics.
Iran’s retaliatory attacks hit Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, all countries that host U.S. military bases or personnel. Executives in those nations are uncertain about the security of their businesses and their employees. Families who left in a rush after the war began on Feb. 28 are considering when, or if, to come back.
And the fate of the Strait of Hormuz — the waterway, vital to the global economy, that Gulf countries need to export their gas and oil — remains up in the air.
In recent weeks, Iran appeared to be operating a de facto toll system for vessels to pass through the strait, Bloomberg News reported. If that scenario outlasts the war, it will be a nightmare for many Gulf nations, putting their export revenues at the mercy of Iran.
“In truth, one of the most significant outcomes of this war is the shattering of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf,” Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, told reporters on March 24. “The security framework in the Gulf was based on certain axioms. Many of these axioms have been bypassed.”
Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, welcomed the cease-fire announcement on Wednesday, while warning that further work was required to protect the region’s security.
“For now the world has stepped back from disaster,” Mr. Albusaidi wrote on social media. “But there’s no room for complacency. Serious negotiations now required for lasting peace.”
A senior Emirati official, Anwar Gargash, sounded a patriotic and celebratory note, saying that the Emirates had “triumphed in a war we sincerely sought to avoid.”
“Today, we move forward to manage a complex regional landscape with greater leverage, sharper insight and a more solid capacity to influence and shape the future,” Mr. Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the Emirati president, wrote on social media.
Yet Gulf countries were still sounding scattered alarms warning of incoming attacks early on Wednesday, adding to skepticism about whether the cease-fire would endure. Bahrain’s interior ministry reported a fire caused by “Iranian aggression”; it said the fire had been extinguished without injuries. And Kuwait’s army reported “an intense wave of hostile Iranian attacks,” including 28 drones, that had been intercepted since 8 a.m. local time on Wednesday — hours after the cease-fire.
“This is a cease-fire plan that does not seem to include the Gulf in consultation,” Mahdi Jasim Ghuloom, a Bahrain political analyst, wrote on social media. “Clearly this will make it more fragile, and Iran has continued attacking some Gulf countries this morning despite the announcement.”
Whatever happens, the region’s royal families will have to reckon with newly apparent limits to their ability to steer Washington’s decision-making in the region, despite the personal ties they have cultivated with President Trump and his family.
“We suffer in the Gulf because he started the war,” Mr. Sager of the Gulf Research Center said. “We told him the consequences. We were never consulted.”
The Gulf countries will also have to decide how to deal with Iran. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates had sought warmer ties with the Islamic republic in recent years, trying to reduce the threat it posed them. Some officials look back at that decision with bitterness.
“When this war eventually ends, in order for there to be any rebuilding of trust will take a long time,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, told reporters on March 19.
Different Gulf governments are likely to adopt different stances, which could deepen cleavages in the region. The feud between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, for example, which was interrupted when both were under attack by Iran, could soon pick up where it left off.
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
April 8, 2026, 6:05 a.m. ET26 minutes ago
Reporting from Jerusalem
Vice President JD Vance acknowledged on Wednesday that the cease-fire remained “a fragile truce.” Speaking in Budapest, Vance sought to dispute Iranian officials’ claims of victory, asserting that some were “basically lying about the nature of the agreement.” Negotiations between the United States and Iran are expected to begin soon in an effort to extend the cease-fire. Vance added that President Trump told him overnight that “the Iranians are better negotiators than they are fighters.”
April 8, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET31 minutes ago
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran told Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan in a phone call that an Iranian delegation would participate in peace talks in Islamabad, Sharif’s office said in a statement. Sharif proposed talks in Islamabad on Friday when he announced the U.S.-Iran cease-fire, but the latest statement does not include a date for the talks.
April 8, 2026, 5:58 a.m. ET33 minutes ago
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Aaron Boxerman
Gulf countries were still reporting incoming fire on Wednesday morning. Kuwait’s army said it was fending off repeated Iranian drone attacks targeting “vital oil facilities and power stations in the south of the country” since 8 a.m. local time, well after the cease-fire was believed to go into effect. Bahrain’s interior ministry said around 7 a.m. air-raid sirens had sounded, while the United Arab Emirates said air defenses were seeking to intercept an incoming missile, without identifying who had fired on them.
April 8, 2026, 5:46 a.m. ET45 minutes ago
Reporting from Jerusalem
Israel’s military is continuing to order some Lebanese to flee their homes or else face imminent danger. Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military spokesman, said people could not yet safely return to the country’s south or Beirut’s southern suburbs. More than a million are estimated to have been uprooted. While mediators had suggested that the cease-fire with Iran should also halt the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group, Israel has said it is pressing forward.
April 8, 2026, 5:36 a.m. ET55 minutes ago
Keith Bradsher and Farnaz Fassihi
Keith Bradsher reported from Beijing and Farnaz Fassihi reported from New York.
China pressed Iran toward the cease-fire deal, Iranian officials say
For years, China has been one of Iran’s most important lifelines. China has bought almost all of its oil exports, shielded it diplomatically and helped it weather international isolation. Now, according to three Iranian officials, Beijing has used that influence for a different purpose: to press Iran to accept the cease-fire with the United States.
Iran’s decision to accept the two-week cease-fire proposal brokered by Pakistan came after diplomatic efforts by Pakistan and a last-minute push by China, according to the Iranian officials. China asked Iran to show flexibility and defuse tensions, they said.
The intervention reflects not only Beijing’s influence over Tehran but also its own stake in preventing a protracted war that could disrupt energy supplies or set off a global recession, as well as hurt Persian Gulf countries, with which China also has close relations. The deal also calls for the immediate opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Chinese officials have not publicly described Beijing’s involvement in the lead-up to the deal announced by President Trump on Tuesday night. Asked on Wednesday if China had helped persuade Iran to agree to the deal, a foreign ministry spokeswoman in Beijing neither confirmed nor denied its involvement, saying only generally that China would continue to “maintain communication with all parties and continue to work toward de-escalating tensions and bringing about a comprehensive cease-fire.”
The deal, which Iran described as a victory in which Washington had accepted its terms, came 90 minutes before a deadline set by Mr. Trump for Iran to accede to his demands or risk widespread devastation.
China’s moves in recent days reflect the delicate balance that Beijing is trying to strike. At the United Nations on Tuesday, Beijing backed Iran by joining Moscow in vetoing a Security Council resolution that could have paved the way for military action to open the Strait of Hormuz. But behind the scenes, by the Iranian officials’ description, China also urged Tehran to pull back from escalation.
Wu Xinbo, a prominent foreign policy expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said he believed that China had played an active role in achieving the cease-fire, not just by encouraging Pakistan to play a role as a mediator but also by directly encouraging Iran to strike a deal.
The top Chinese foreign affairs official, Wang Yi, made a flurry of calls to his counterparts in the region emphasizing the need for a cease-fire and for countries not to resort to force to reopen the strait, according to the foreign ministry. Last week, he met in Beijing with Pakistani officials, who came to the Chinese capital after hosting a meeting in Islamabad with officials from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to discuss a possible resolution of the conflict.
Pakistan and Iran are both heavily dependent on China. Loans from China have become vital to keeping the heavily indebted Pakistani economy afloat. And China has played a central role over the last several years in supporting the Iranian economy, by buying almost all of its oil exports at a time when many other countries avoided doing business with Iran because of its nuclear weapons program.
Shen Dingli, an independent international relations scholar in Shanghai, noted that China had sought to distance itself from Iran since the war began. Beijing sent only a vice foreign minister to the Iranian Embassy to express condolences on the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who had been killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Mr. Wang, the foreign minister, in one of his calls with his Iranian counterpart, even urged Tehran to “pay attention to the legitimate concerns of its neighbors,” meaning the Gulf nations, Mr. Shen noted.
China has often tried to cast itself as a mediator on the world stage and a responsible global power, in unspoken contrast to the United States. It helped broker a surprise rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023, for example. But other attempts have been less successful. Beijing set forth a 12-point peace plan for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a three-part proposal for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, both of which were vague and saw little apparent follow-up.
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong and Siyi Zhao contributed research from Beijing.
2 hours ago
Bureau chief for Iran and Iraq
Iranian officials are declaring the cease-fire deal a win for Iran, hours after President Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization. Mohammad Reza Aref, Iran’s first vice president, wrote on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun. Mohsen Ejei, the head of the Iranian judiciary, said that the country had “proven that it is unyielding and undefeatable.”
April 8, 2026, 4:37 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Bureau chief for Iran and Iraq
An alliance of Iraqi militias aligned to Iran announced in a statement that they will abide by the temporary cease-fire between Iran and the United States. The groups had been firing missiles and drones almost daily at U.S. targets inside Iraq, as well as at neighboring Gulf countries.
April 8, 2026, 4:36 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Bureau chief for Iran and Iraq
Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who has long mediated between Iran and the United States, said in a statement that the temporary cease-fire means that “for now the world has stepped back from disaster. But there’s no room for complacency. Serious negotiations now required for lasting peace. Oman will support this work for the vital and urgent purpose of strong and enduring regional security.”
April 8, 2026, 4:33 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Reporting from Haifa, Israel
Iraq’s airspace and airports will reopen today after being closed when the war started, the country’s civil aviation authority announced on Wednesday. The war has severely affected air travel across the Middle East, with multiple countries restricting or closing their airspace to civilian flights.
April 8, 2026, 4:10 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Iran correspondent
Nima, a Tehran resident, said Wednesday morning was the first time in around 40 days that he was not worried that his colleagues might be killed in an airstrike. It was a good feeling, he said — the latest in a swirl of emotions that Iranians like him have experienced while waiting to see what would come of President Trump’s threat to wipe out their civilization and reports of a flurry of negotiations to pause the war.
“Last night was a really frightening evening,” he said, declining to be fully named for fear of government reprisal.
He opposed the war, and worried about what might come next for the country, given the damage to Iranian infrastructure and key economic players.
“Economically speaking, the country has seen a lot of damage,” he said. “The country is truly poor.”
April 8, 2026, 3:59 a.m. ET3 hours ago
Reporting from Haifa, Israel
In an apparent reference to the cease-fire deal, Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in Israel, accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of overseeing “a diplomatic disaster” and of failing to meet the war’s goals. “It will take us years to repair the diplomatic and strategic damage that Netanyahu inflicted due to arrogance, negligence, and a lack of strategic planning,” Lapid said on social media on Wednesday.
April 8, 2026, 3:39 a.m. ET3 hours ago
The shipping giant Maersk said on Wednesday that it welcomed the cease-fire announcement and the statements that commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz may be possible again. It said it was working urgently to get more information and was not making specific changes yet. “The cease-fire may create transit opportunities, but it does not yet provide full maritime certainty and we need to understand all potential conditions attached,” the company said in a statement.
April 8, 2026, 3:29 a.m. ET3 hours ago
Iran correspondent
A man in Tehran, who is in his 20s and insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals, said that the cease-fire left him with mixed feelings. There was a quiet in the city that he hadn’t experienced in more than a month and he was relieved not to face the prospect of total annihilation, he said. But he worried about the confidence he said the regime would have as a result of surviving the war, and how it might further crush domestic opposition. He said he would use whatever stability the cease-fire provided to make plans to leave Iran.
April 8, 2026, 3:18 a.m. ET3 hours ago
Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
Confusion is swirling in Lebanon over whether the country was included in the cease-fire deal. Pakistan said it was, but Israel said it wasn’t. As attacks inside Lebanon continued on Wednesday, the Lebanese military warned displaced civilians to postpone their return to southern towns and villages, warning that doing so could expose them to ongoing Israeli attacks.
4 hours ago
Rebecca F. Elliott and Ivan Penn
Rebecca Elliott reported from Houston and New York, and Ivan Penn from Los Angeles.
Why you can’t ‘flick a switch’ to get oil and gas flowing out of the Persian Gulf
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a central aim for the United States when it agreed to a cease-fire with Iran — would be the first step toward getting more energy flowing through the Persian Gulf.
But only the first step.
That is because dozens of refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields in at least nine countries, from Iran to the United Arab Emirates and beyond, have been targeted in strikes. All told, 10 percent or more of the world’s oil supply has been turned off. Restarting those operations will require not only safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but also inspecting pumps, replacing bespoke processing equipment and recalling employees and ships that have scattered across the globe.
“It’s not a case of you just flick a switch and everything’s back up again,” said Martin Houston, a longtime oil and gas executive who now serves as board member for several energy companies.
The timeline for bringing the Gulf energy system back to some semblance of normal is highly uncertain. For one thing, the war has been paused for only two weeks.
In the cease-fire deal, which President Trump announced on Tuesday evening, Iran agreed to allow ships to pass through the strait without being attacked. Earlier that day, Mr. Trump said that if the waterway remained closed, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He has also repeatedly threatened to strike Iranian power plants and other critical infrastructure if Iran does not allow vessels to pass through the strait — acts that could be considered war crimes.
Attacks on energy facilities continued in the days leading up to the cease-fire, including on an oil refinery in Kuwait and petrochemical complexes in Iran. How much damage has already been done to the region’s infrastructure is difficult to know because many countries have shared little information.
Once companies regain confidence that their ships can transit the narrow waterway that runs between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the first order of business is likely to be shipping out the oil and other fuels that countries close to the strait stockpiled in storage tanks. Then, as long as hostilities do not resume, some wells are likely to flow again within days or weeks, industry analysts and Gulf oil executives say.
But a fuller recovery will be a monthslong process, they cautioned. And even then, some infrastructure that has sustained extensive damage is expected to take years to repair.
For consumers, this means that gasoline prices at the pump — which recently topped $4 a gallon, on average, in the United States — are unlikely to return to their prewar levels any time soon, even though international oil prices fell considerably late Tuesday. Countries are using up stores of energy they had before the war, so the longer the war drags on, the stickier those high prices are likely to be.
The shuttering of oil wells has other consequences. Once idled, oil and gas wells can be difficult to restart, and the longer they remain closed, the more trouble companies may have turning them back on.
The pressure underground can get out of whack while wells are closed; water can build up. If the shutdowns last a long time, equipment might corrode after being exposed to hydrogen sulfide for too long. The toxic gas, which smells like rotten eggs, is often found mixed in with oil and natural gas. Saudi Arabia and Iraq inject gas or water into many of their wells to coax out more oil, adding another layer of complexity to re-establishing the correct pressure when the time comes to reopen, the research firm BloombergNEF wrote recently.
Kuwait, which is sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Iraq at the tip of the Persian Gulf, is the world’s 10th-largest oil producer. Before Friday, when its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery was hit by a drone, the chief executive of the state-owned oil company Kuwait Petroleum said he expected to be able to “bring out quite a bit of production immediately, within a few days” of the war’s ending. Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah, the chief executive, added during remarks late last month at an energy conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, in Houston that “the full production will come within three or four months.”
The big question is how much damage has been sustained by all the infrastructure needed to get oil and gas from wellheads to world markets. Analysts say few installations appear to have suffered catastrophic harm, but they are working with limited information about most facilities.
One of the most important energy assets in the region is Qatar’s natural-gas export plant, Ras Laffan. The site, which spans at least three square miles in a large industrial city, supplies countries throughout Asia and Europe with natural gas that people use for cooking, heating homes and generating electricity.
Before it can be loaded on a ship, natural gas must be turned into a liquid by cooling it at about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 degrees Celsius). Qatar stopped making this liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., during the early days of the war. Missiles later took out 17 percent of the site’s capacity.
The undamaged parts of the facility would be restarted first, likely over a period of weeks or months. Steps include reopening the offshore gas wells that feed the export terminal; restarting any utilities that had been turned off; restocking the inventory of fuels used to cool the gas, known as refrigerants; and then actually cooling the gas, said Mehdy Touil, who spent more than a decade at Ras Laffan and is now the lead L.N.G. specialist at Calypso Commodities, a Berlin company.
The damaged portions are another matter. QatarEnergy, which operates Ras Laffan, has said it will take several years to repair those areas and bring them online. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Ras Laffan has 14 L.N.G.-producing units. The strikes last month took out the heart of two of them — the mammoth structures in which gas is cooled — QatarEnergy’s chief executive told Reuters. That equipment can be as tall as an 18-story building, and the lead time for a new one can run two years or more, industry officials said.
“These facilities were custom‑engineered and integrated into the broader Ras Laffan complex, making them substantially more difficult to replace” than simpler kinds of energy infrastructure, said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California.
Less is known about the extent of the damage to oil-processing facilities throughout the region. A refinery on the west coast of Saudi Arabia had been operating at much lower levels after a drone strike in mid-March, according to Rystad Energy, an Oslo-based consulting firm. Rystad estimated that the refinery most likely could be fully restored within a year.
Iran has also suffered attacks on its energy infrastructure, including strikes on oil depots in Tehran that turned the sky over the capital city black.
One concern for rebuilding is that supply chains for some specialized parts have already been stretched thin. The rush to build data centers for artificial intelligence has created a demand for gas-fired power plants and other energy infrastructure. Many of those facilities rely on equipment, like gas turbines, that may also be needed to make repairs in the Gulf.
“If you have the right supply chain, you can get things built back pretty quickly,” said Mike Stice, a University of Oklahoma professor who serves on the board of energy companies including the U.S. refining giant Marathon Petroleum. But, he added, timelines will depend a lot on what has been damaged. “All it takes is one critical piece of equipment that has a two-year delivery date.”
In the end, however the conflict plays out, analysts expect energy prices to eventually fall from wartime levels, but remain higher than they would have been in the absence of war.
Analysts at the French bank Société Générale recently said they expected oil to trade around $80 a barrel at the end of 2026, up from their earlier forecast of $65. Traders will be pricing in a greater risk of geopolitical disruption in the future.