When the United States and Israel launched their coordinated attack on Iran in the early hours of February 28, 2026, an operation Washington dubbed “Operation Epic Fury,” the Gulf states did not applaud. They watched with fear.
For years, they had invested enormous diplomatic capital to prevent precisely this moment. They had engaged with Tehran, maintained embassies and offered repeated assurances that their territories would not serve as launching pads against the Islamic Republic.
That Iran’s response was to aim its missiles at those same neighbors is not only a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions, but also a profound moral and legal failure that risks poisoning relations for generations to come.
A track record of genuine moderation
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states did not come to this crisis as enemies of Iran. They arrived as reluctant spectators, having spent years threading a needle between Washington and Tehran with deliberate, often thankless care.
Saudi Arabia opted for dialogue in 2019 and sought a full diplomatic rapprochement with Tehran. That process culminated in the historic normalization agreement negotiated by China in 2023 and the reopening of embassies. Riyadh’s bet was that compromise, not confrontation, was the path to stability. Even as the current crisis was escalating, Saudi Arabia explicitly confirmed to Iranian authorities that it would not allow its airspace or territory to be used to attack Iran. The word of the kingdom was given. He was not honored in return.
Qatar had spent years in mediation, serving as an indispensable interlocutor between Hamas and Israel, and between Iran and the United States. Doha hosted indirect nuclear talks and advocated for diplomatic solutions when few would.
Oman, for its part, served as a silent conduit for the same negotiations that, as recently as the eve of war, offered the slightest hope of an agreement. Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi expressed optimism that peace was “within reach” the day before the bombs fell.
Across the GCC, governments gave repeated and public assurances to Iran and the world that their territories would not be used to launch attacks against the Islamic Republic. These assurances were credible. They were substantive commitments backed by years of diplomatic engagement.
Iran itself tacitly acknowledged his sincerity: on March 5, Tehran issued a notable public expression of gratitude to Saudi Arabia for maintaining its commitment to not allow its territory to be used against Iran. That recognition makes Iran’s actions even more contradictory and indefensible.
Because these are not actions of hostile neighbors. These are the actions of States that understood the neighborhood in which they lived and chose, repeatedly, the difficult path of diplomacy.
The response that shocked the region
Iran’s response has rewarded years of Gulf good faith with a bombardment more ferocious than any other directed against the countries that launched the war. Official statistics show that in the early days of the war, Iran fired more than twice as many ballistic missiles and about 20 times as many drones at the Gulf States than at Israel. Three people were killed and 78 injured in the United Arab Emirates alone; Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery burned; major Gulf airports were attacked; and Qatar’s Ras Laffan, a pillar of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies, was attacked.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant portion of the world’s LNG passes daily, caused an immediate shock to international markets. Iranian threats of attacks almost completely paralyzed commercial shipping through the passage, severing the artery connecting Gulf energy producers to the economies of Asia, Europe and beyond. With Saudi, Emirati and Qatari exports frozen and insurance markets in free fall, the specter of a prolonged shutdown raised alarms not seen since the tanker wars of the 1980s, bringing the world considerably closer to an economic shock that no recovery manual is designed to absorb.
Illegal, counterproductive and unacceptable
Iran’s attacks on sovereign Gulf territory are not simply strategically wrong; They are illegal under international law. The Gulf states are not parties to the conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States. They did not authorize military operations against Iran from their soil. Attacking civilian infrastructure, airports, hotels, refineries and ports in non-combatant states violates fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including the prohibition of attacks against civilian objects and the requirement to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
Tehran has tried to justify the attacks by arguing that the presence of US military bases on Gulf soil makes those states legitimate targets. This logic does not hold up. The GCC states gave ironclad assurances to Iran, continually and emphatically, both before the war and until its eve, that their territories would not be used to attack Iran. The GCC’s own extraordinary ministerial statement of March 1, 2026 made this explicit, noting that the attacks occurred “despite numerous diplomatic efforts by the GCC countries to prevent escalation and their confirmation that their territories will not be used to launch any attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The GCC-EU joint ministerial meeting on March 5 echoed this point. Iran’s own deputy foreign minister, Hamid Ghanbari, told Al Jazeera that Iran “regrets any humanitarian loss caused by the current military escalation,” an implicit recognition that the attacks have caused damage that cannot be healed through a strategic framework.
Qatar, whose approach to Iran was among the most sustained and sincere of any Gulf state, issued what officials described as the strongest condemnation in the country’s history, calling the attacks “reckless and irresponsible.” The GCC Ministerial Council, meeting in an extraordinary emergency session on March 1, issued a broad collective condemnation describing the attacks as “atrocious” and a “serious violation of the sovereignty of these countries, of the principles of good neighborliness and a clear violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”
The Council affirmed that Member States “shall take all necessary measures to defend their security and stability,” including the option of self-defense, language of a gravity rarely heard in the Gulf diplomatic establishment. The unanimity and sharpness of that collective voice reflects the depth of betrayal felt throughout the region.
The strategic logic by which Iran operates – that attacking the Gulf States will pressure Washington to end the war – is not only flawed in practice, but actively serves Israeli interests. By extending the conflict to the Gulf, Tehran is doing precisely what Israel could not do alone: diverting the war from the Israeli-Iranian axis and transforming it into a confrontation between Iran and its Arab neighbors.
Every missile fired at Dubai, Doha or Riyadh changes the narrative, drags the Gulf States into a conflict they sought to avoid and weakens the actors most capable of mediating to find a way out. This is a strategic miscalculation of the first order. The broader region’s interest lies in preventing Israel from emerging as the undisputed hegemon of the Middle East, a scenario that becomes more likely, not less, the more Iran pushes its Arab neighbors out of their potential role as honest brokers and into the arms of deeper security alignment with Washington. Iran, by targeting the Gulf, is not resisting the new regional order; You are building it without realizing it.
The need for exit ramps before the staircase is blocked
The most urgent imperative now is to act before the window closes. A ceasefire must be achieved proactively and without conditions. Wars reach critical thresholds, at which point each side becomes so committed to its position, its sacrifices, and its narrative of necessity that finding a way out becomes almost impossible.
There are signs that the threshold is approaching. Iran has declared that it will fight until “the enemy is decisively defeated.” The US Senate did not invoke war powers to stop President Trump’s operations. Iran’s proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and militias in Iraq, are actively involved in operations. With each passing day the corridor of possibilities narrows.
What is urgently needed is a coordinated international effort to build exit ramps that neither Washington nor Tehran can build alone. This requires the commitment of all countries in the vast geography that this war is already shaping: the Gulf states, whose energy infrastructure underpins much of the global economy; the Asian powers: China, India, Japan, South Korea, whose energy security, trade routes and financial stability are directly endangered by a prolonged Gulf conflict; European states that depend on Gulf LNG and have long advocated diplomatic means; and African nations whose access to food and fuel passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Qatar and Oman retain a unique and irreplaceable capacity to serve as interlocutors, as both have done in every previous moment of brinksmanship: Qatar as the indispensable mediator between rival parties, Oman as the backchannel of trust between Tehran and the West.
China, which negotiated the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement and has deep economic interests in both Tehran and the Gulf, has incentives and influence. European governments, which defended the nuclear deal for more than a decade and now face the immediate pain of the disruption of LNG shipments, have every reason, economic and strategic, to strongly oppose Washington’s course. A prolonged Gulf War not only deprives Europe of energy, it also drains attention and resources that Europe can least afford to divert while Russia remains undefeated on its eastern flank. A concerted global effort is needed to give Washington and Tehran a face-saving way out, one that allows each to declare victory and step back before this conflict metastasizes into a regional war that could dwarf Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
The Gulf States have demonstrated, through years of patient and continuous diplomacy, that good neighborliness with Iran was their preferred option. Iran has responded to that choice with missiles. Tehran would do well to remember that the Gulf states it is now bombing are the very neighbors best placed to offer it a way out, through their mediation expertise and global influence. An exit ramp must be built, but the window to build one will not remain open indefinitely.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
