When the United States and Israel launched a coordinated attack on Iran in the early hours of February 28, 2026, in an operation Washington dubbed “Operation Epic Fury,” Gulf states did not cheer. They looked on in horror.
For years, they have invested vast amounts of diplomatic capital to prevent this very moment. They engaged with Tehran, maintained an embassy and repeatedly assured that their territory would not serve as a launching pad against the Islamic Republic.
That Iran’s response was to aim missiles at its fellow neighbors is not only a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions, but also a grave moral and legal failure that risks damaging relations for generations to come.
Record of genuine restraint
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries did not approach this crisis as Iran’s enemies. They arrived as reluctant bystanders, spending years threading the needle between Washington and Tehran, paying deliberate and often unrequited attention.
Saudi Arabia opted for dialogue in 2019 and pursued full diplomatic access with Tehran. That process culminated in a landmark China-brokered normalization deal in 2023 and the reopening of embassies. Riyadh’s bet was that engagement, not confrontation, was the path to stability. Despite the escalation of the current crisis, Saudi Arabia has clearly confirmed to Iranian authorities that it will not allow its airspace or territory to be used to target Iran. The word of the kingdom has been given. It was not respected in return.
Qatar has invested in mediation for years, serving as an essential interlocutor between Hamas and Israel, Iran and the United States. Doha hosted indirect nuclear talks and called for a diplomatic solution when few other countries sought one.
Oman, on the other hand, served as a quiet conduit for the negotiations themselves, which held out a sliver of hope for an agreement until very recently, on the eve of war. The day before the bombing, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi expressed optimism that peace was “within reach.”
Governments across the GCC have repeatedly publicly assured Iran and the world that their territory will not be used for attacks against the Islamic Republic. These guarantees were reliable. These were substantial promises backed by years of diplomatic engagement.
Iran itself tacitly acknowledged their sincerity. On March 5, the Iranian government issued a notable public expression of gratitude to Saudi Arabia for keeping its promise not to allow its territory to be used against Iran. This realization makes Iran’s actions all the more contradictory and indefensible.
Because these are not the acts of a hostile neighbor. These are the actions of a nation that understands the region in which it lives and has repeatedly chosen the difficult path of diplomacy.
Responses that shocked the region
Iran’s response has rewarded years of goodwill in the Gulf with the most ferocious barrage ever directed at the countries that started the war. In the early stages of the war, Iran launched more than twice as many ballistic missiles and about 20 times as many drones into Gulf states than Israel, according to official statistics. Three people were killed and 78 injured in the UAE alone. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery was set on fire. Major airports across the Gulf were targeted. And Qatar’s Ras Laffan, a mainstay of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply, was hit hard.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant proportion of the world’s LNG passes every day, sent an immediate shockwave through international markets. The threat of Iranian attack has brought commercial shipping along the route to a near standstill, severing the artery connecting Gulf energy producers to economies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. With Saudi, UAE and Qatari exports frozen and insurance markets collapsing, fears of a prolonged shutdown have sparked alarm not seen since the tanker wars of the 1980s, pushing the world steadily closer to an economic shock with no recovery strategy envisaged.
illegal, counterproductive and unacceptable
Iran’s attacks on sovereign territory in the Gulf are not just strategically wrong. They are illegal under international law. Gulf states are not parties to the conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States. They did not allow military operations against Iran from their territory. Targeting civilian infrastructure, airports, hotels, refineries, and ports of non-participating countries violates fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including the prohibition against attacks on civilian objects and the requirement to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
The Iranian government has tried to justify its attacks by arguing that the presence of U.S. military bases in the Gulf region makes these countries legitimate targets. This logic doesn’t hold. From pre-war to pre-war, the GCC countries gave Iran continuous and firm guarantees that their territory would not be used to attack Iran. The GCC’s own Extraordinary Ministerial Statement on March 1, 2026 made this clear, noting that the attack took place “despite numerous diplomatic efforts by GCC countries to avoid escalation and assurances that their territory will not be used to launch attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
This point was reiterated at the joint ministerial meeting of the GCC and the European Union on 5 March. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid Gambari told Al Jazeera that Iran “deplores the humanitarian losses caused by the current military escalation,” tacitly acknowledging that the attack caused damage that cannot be cleansed within a strategic framework.
Officials from Qatar, which has been one of the most persistent and loyal Gulf states in supporting Iran, issued the strongest condemnation in its history, calling the attack “reckless and irresponsible.” The GCC Council of Ministers, which held an emergency extraordinary session on March 1, issued a collective condemnation of the attack, calling it “heinous” and “a gross violation of the sovereignty of these countries, the principle of good neighborliness, and a clear violation of international law and the United Nations Charter.”
The council confirmed that member states will “take all necessary measures to safeguard security and stability,” including the option of self-defense, words with weight rarely heard from diplomatic missions in the Gulf. The unity and sharpness of that group’s voice reflects the depth of betrayal felt across the region.
Iran’s strategic logic that attacking Gulf states would pressure Washington to end the war is not only practically flawed, but actively serves Israel’s interests. By extending the conflict to the Gulf, Tehran is doing exactly what Israel could not do on its own. It is moving the war away from the Israel-Iran axis and turning it into a conflict between Iran and its Arab neighbors.
Each time a missile is launched into Dubai, Doha, or Riyadh, the narrative changes, drawing Gulf states deeper into the conflict they were trying to avoid and weakening the very actors most capable of mediating an exit. This is the first strategic miscalculation. The broader regional interest lies in preventing Israel from emerging as the undisputed hegemon in the Middle East, a scenario that becomes more likely, not less, the more Iran pushes its Arab neighbors out of their potential roles as honest intermediaries and into the arsenal of closer security cooperation with the United States. Although Iran is targeting the Gulf, it is not resisting the new regional order. We are building it inadvertently.
Exit ramp required before ladder locks
The most urgent need now is to act before the window closes. A ceasefire must be pursued unconditionally and aggressively. The war reaches a critical point, at which point it becomes nearly impossible to find a way out, as both sides become so committed to their stories of position, sacrifice, and need.
There are signs that the threshold is approaching. Iran has vowed to fight until “the enemy is decisively defeated.” The U.S. Senate failed to invoke war powers to rein in President Trump’s operations. Iranian proxies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraqi militias are actively engaged in operations. The corridor of possibilities narrows with each passing day.
What is urgently needed is a concerted international effort to build an exit ramp that neither Washington nor Iran can build alone. This will require the involvement of all countries within the vast geography that this war has already shaped. The energy infrastructure of the Gulf countries supports much of the world economy. Asian powers: China, India, Japan, South Korea. The energy security, trade routes, and financial stability of these countries are directly at risk from the protracted Gulf conflict. European countries rely on Gulf LNG and have long advocated a diplomatic path. and African countries whose access to food and fuel is via the Strait of Hormuz.
Qatar and Oman hold a unique and irreplaceable ability to act as interlocutors, as they have done in every previous moment of brinkmanship, with Qatar serving as a vital intermediary between rival parties and Oman as a reliable back channel between Iran and the West.
China, which brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement in 2023 and has deep economic interests in both Tehran and the Gulf, has both incentives and influence. European governments, which have defended the nuclear deal for more than a decade and now face the immediate pain of halting LNG shipments, have good economic and strategic reasons to firmly resist Washington’s policy. A prolonged Gulf War would not only deplete Europe’s energy, but also deplete the attention and resources that Europe could best divert while Russia remained undefeated in the East. A concerted global effort is needed to allow both Washington and Iran to save face and withdraw before this conflict escalates into a regional war that could dwarf Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Through years of patient and sustained diplomacy, Gulf states have demonstrated that good neighborly relations with Iran are their preferred option. Iran responded to that choice with missiles. Tehran would be wise to remember that the Gulf states it is currently attacking are also neighbors who, through their mediation expertise and global influence, are best positioned to offer Iran a way out. You need to build an off-ramp, but the window to build it won’t stay open indefinitely.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
