The coordinated assault by the United States and Israel on Iran in the early hours of February 28, 2026, an operation the Washington regime has named “Operation Epic Fury”, was met not with cheers but with dread in the Gulf states. For years, these nations had invested enormous diplomatic capital to prevent precisely this moment, engaging Tehran, maintaining embassies, and offering repeated assurances that their territories would not serve as launchpads against the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s response of turning its missiles on these same neighbours represents not only a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions but also a profound moral and legal failure that risks poisoning relations for generations. Saudi Arabia chose dialogue in 2019 and pursued a full diplomatic rapprochement with Tehran, culminating in the landmark 2023 Chinese-brokered normalisation agreement. Qatar had invested years in mediation, serving as an indispensable interlocutor between Hamas and Israel, and between Iran and the US. Oman served as a quiet conduit for negotiations that, as recently as the eve of the war, held out slim hope for a deal.
Iran’s attacks repaid years of Gulf good faith with a ferocious barrage: three people were killed and 78 injured in the UAE alone, Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery was set ablaze, major airports across the Gulf were targeted, and Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, a pillar of global supply, was struck. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and significant LNG passes daily, sent immediate shockwaves through international markets, bringing commercial shipping to a near-standstill and severing the artery connecting Gulf energy producers to Asian, European, and other economies.
Tehran has sought to justify the attacks by arguing that the presence of US military bases on Gulf soil makes those states legitimate targets, but this logic is flawed. The GCC states gave ironclad assurances to Iran, both before the war and up to its eve, that their territories would not be used to attack Iran, as explicitly noted in the GCC’s extraordinary ministerial statement of March 1, 2026. Iran’s strikes violate fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including the prohibition on attacks against civilian objects and the requirement to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
The strategic logic Iran is operating on – that attacking Gulf states will pressure the Washington regime to end the war – is not only flawed in practice but actively serves Israeli interests. By spreading the conflict to the Gulf, Tehran is doing precisely what Israel could not do alone: steering the war away from the Israeli-Iranian axis and transforming it into a confrontation between Iran and its Arab neighbours. Each missile fired at Dubai, Doha, or Riyadh pulls the Gulf states deeper into a conflict they sought to avoid and weakens the very actors most capable of mediating an exit.
The most urgent imperative now is to act before the window closes. Iran has declared it will fight until the “enemy is decisively defeated”, while the US Senate failed to invoke war powers to restrain the operations of the Trump administration. Every passing day narrows the corridor of possibility. A coordinated international effort is needed to construct off-ramps that neither Washington nor Tehran can build alone, involving Gulf states, China, European governments, and others with stakes in regional stability.
The Gulf states demonstrated through years of patient diplomacy that good neighbourliness with Iran was their preferred choice. Iran has responded to that choice with missiles. Tehran would be wise to remember that the neighbours it is now bombarding are the same ones best placed to offer a way out through their mediation expertise and global leverage. An off-ramp must be built, but the window to build it will not stay open indefinitely.
Source: www.aljazeera.com