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DOHA – US President Donald Trump pressed for a de-escalation of attacks on Middle East energy sites after Iranian and Israeli strikes on major gas fields jolted global markets.
Mr Trump said Israel will stop attacking the massive South Pars gas field that Iran shares with Qatar, but he also threatened to “massively blow up” Iran’s portion of the gas field if Tehran attacks Qatar’s side of it.
Israel carried out an attack on South Pars – the world’s largest natural gas deposit – on March 18.
Iran responded by targeting energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia with a wave of drones and missiles.
Qatar said Iranian missile attacks inflicted “extensive damage” on a major coastal energy hub, Ras Laffan Industrial City.
QatarEnergy, the state-owned petroleum company, later said separate attacks caused fires and “extensive further damage” at its liquefied natural gas facilities.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry called the assault “a dangerous escalation, a flagrant violation of state sovereignty”. The ministry said it had asked Iran’s military and security attaches and their staff to leave Qatar within 24 hours.
Saudi Arabia said it intercepted and destroyed four ballistic missiles launched by Iran towards Riyadh.
Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan later said Saudi Arabia is considering taking “military action” in response to repeated missile and drone attacks from Iran.
In Kuwait, state media said a drone attack on March 19 caused a “limited fire” at Mina Al-Ahmadi, a major oil refinery operated by the Kuwait National Petroleum Company. The fire has been put out and there were no injuries, the Kuwait News Agency said.
As military operations showed little signs of abating, Brent crude prices rose 4 per cent to US$113 (S$145) a barrel.
Stocks fell on March 19 across Asia, where countries import vast quantities of oil and gas.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan ended down 3.38 per cent. The Hang Seng Stock Index in Hong Kong dropped over 1.87 per cent, while the Shanghai Composite shed 1.39 per cent, and South Korea’s Kospi fell 2.73 per cent.
European shares slipped as the conflict in the Middle East sapped risk appetite while markets awaited the European Central Bank’s monetary policy verdict.
The pan-European STOXX 600 was down 1.3 per cent at 590.43 points by 0809 GMT (4.09pm, Singapore time), with industrials being the biggest drag on the benchmark.
London stocks were down 1 per cent ahead of the Bank of England’s interest rate decision.
Futures for the S&P 500 pointed to a slight increase when stocks resume trading in the United States. The S&P 500 fell 1.4 per cent on March 18, bring its loss since the war began to 3.7 per cent.
Mr Trump said in a post on X late on March 18 that Israel “violently lashed out” and attacked the South Pars gas field “out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East”.
“Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility,” he added.
He said the United States and Qatar were not involved in the attack on South Pars.
He then promised: “”NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar.”
If Iran retaliates, he warned, the US “with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before”.
With de-escalation nowhere in sight, Mr Trump is considering sending thousands more US troops to the Middle East, according to a US official and three people familiar with the planning.
Those troops could be used to restore the safe passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for a fifth of the world’s oil trade.
The foreign ministers of 12 Muslim-majority countries meeting in Riyadh denounced Iran’s strikes across the Gulf and called for an immediate halt.
Tehran’s targeting of residential areas and civilian infrastructure, such as oil facilities, airports and desalination plants, could not be justified under any circumstances, the ministers said in a statement.
“This pressure from Iran will backfire politically and morally, and certainly we reserve the right to take military actions, if deemed necessary,” Prince Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, told reporters.
Interceptors were seen fired from near the Riyadh hotel where the conference was held around the time the ministers gathered for the consultative meeting on the Iran war.
The United Arab Emirates shut down its Habshan gas facility after it intercepted missiles fired in what its Foreign Ministry called a “terrorist attack” by Iran.
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Iran since the US-Israeli attacks began on Feb 28, the US-based Iran human rights group HRANA estimates. REUTERS
