Iran war grinds on as Hormuz cable threat unnerves Gulf

Tehran, Iran: In the southern city of Minab, the scars of war are measured in classrooms. A strike on an elementary school in February was among the episodes that have left families across Iran grieving, as a six-month-old US-Israeli campaign continues to reshape daily life in cities, towns and villages.

The conflict has not spared the south. A wedding gathering in southern Iran was struck in September, and by April the Iranian Red Crescent had recorded more than 125,000 damaged civilian units, including roughly 100,000 homes. For many Iranians, the war is not an abstraction but a reality of ruined houses, disrupted schooling and funerals.

Behind the human toll lies a wider impasse. Washington insists Iran is weakening and that victory is within reach, but the fighting has lasted far longer and cost far more than the Trump administration initially suggested. Last week President Donald Trump dismissed the conflict as "small potatoes", even as the toll mounted.

The war has killed 18 American service members and wounded more than 750, at a cost to US taxpayers of at least US$37.5 billion. The price for Iran has been far heavier: by 10 June, at least 3,468 people had been killed and more than 26,500 injured in US and Israeli attacks, according to figures from Iran's Ministry of Health.

Iran has shown it can inflict costs of its own. An analysis found Iranian strikes had damaged 15 US military sites across the region, including barracks, hangars, fuel depots, aircraft, radar systems, communications equipment and air-defence systems. Tehran has also submitted a list of 134 damaged cultural sites to UNESCO, and Reuters has documented damage to historic buildings and protected sites.

The stalemate is now extending into the waters of the Gulf. The US Navy is preventing Iranian vessels and others from transiting to or from Iranian ports, while Iran threatens shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz and has said it will establish a new "restricted zone" stretching into the Gulf.

Less visible, but potentially more consequential, is the network of undersea cables crossing the Persian Gulf. On 16 August, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government was considering attacks on that network. In the Gulf's relatively shallow waters, threats to this critical undersea infrastructure pose a credible risk to the region and the wider world.

The cables carry more than 95% of international data traffic and underpin financial transactions, government communications and the data-hungry operations of the global technology sector. Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are investing heavily in subsea connectivity as they expand data-centre networks to meet the demands of artificial intelligence.

For the Gulf States, which are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as they seek to diversify away from fossil fuels, severed cables would strike at the heart of their economic ambitions. A disruption would ripple far beyond communications, threatening the digital foundations of economies across the region and the global firms that depend on them.

The outlook remains uncertain. The conflict has reached what appears to be a stalemate: the United States and Israel have caused enormous destruction without compelling Tehran to accept Washington's demands. The question is no longer whether the United States can inflict more damage on Iran, but how further damage would produce victory.