A strong global response to protect undersea fibre-optic cables in the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly a fifth of the world’s and much of Bahrain’s data flows, is necessary to ensure economic and national security, according to top researchers.
The Bahrain Centre for Strategic, International and Energy Studies (Derasat) is also calling for the deployment of redundant cable routes that bypass the Strait, investing in advanced seabed surveillance technologies, and establishing a multilateral insurance and compensation fund for cable damage caused by state actors.
The ‘digital highway’ of undersea cables handles trillions of dollars in daily financial transactions, enables real-time global supply-chain co-ordination, and supports everything from telemedicine to military command-and-control systems.
“The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a strategic waterway for oil tankers to pass through, it is a critical artery for submarine cables that carry the lifeblood of the Internet worldwide,” Derasat economic studies programme senior analyst Ali Faqeeh told the GDN.
“Several major international cable systems traverse or terminate in the waters adjacent to the Strait, including segments of the South-East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe (SMW) cable network, the Gulf Bridge International cable, and various regional links connecting the GCC countries to Europe and Asia.”
According to a submarine cable map maintained by US-based telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, five submarine fibre-optic cable systems – 2Africa, FALCON, Fibre Optic Gulf, Gulf Bridge International Cable System/Middle East North Africa Cable System and Tata TGN-Gulf – currently connect Bahrain through submarine cables to the digital world.
There are two additional cable systems – Fibre in Gulf and SeaMeWe-6 – which are currently under construction, with an estimated completion in 2027.
“Today, almost 99 per cent of international data traffic flows through underwater fibre-optic cables, the stability of global telecommunications has become a cornerstone of economic security, national defence and everyday life,” Mr Faqeeh added.
“However, this vital infrastructure faces an escalating threat from Iran, who has repeatedly signalled towards the targeting of communication lines.
“A single deliberate severance in this narrow chokepoint only 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest could instantly hurt connectivity for entire regions, causing cascading outages across the Middle East, Europe and beyond.”
Mr Faqeeh is calling on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency responsible for co-ordinating global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards to implement strong, enforceable measures, alongside a global coalition including the US, EU and GCC countries.
The measures, according to the researcher, should include the temporary suspension of offending actors’ voting rights in ITU study groups, designation of Iranian territorial waters and airspace as high-risk zones for cable-laying and maintenance operations, and the establishment of a dedicated ITU task force for critical submarine cable security.
“In a time of increased regional tension, the risk is no longer theoretical: an Iranian decision to target communications could be executed with plausible deniability, yet the strategic impact would be immediate and devastating at a global level.”
In the past two years, at least two cable-cutting incidents have taken place in the Red Sea.
In February 2024, according to the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Internet connectivity between parts of Asia, Africa and Europe suddenly slowed when three undersea cables were damaged.
Last year, subsea cable outages in the Red Sea led to service disruptions on traffic routes through the Middle East.
Although redundancies are built into Internet cable systems to route the affected traffic through alternate cables, download and upload speeds are affected and repair operations are complicated – often taking months and costing millions of dollars.
In addition, repair ships have to wait until geopolitical tensions subside before venturing out to sea.
According to American non-profit organisation Rest of World, the 2024 incident, for example, took up to five to six months for the cables to be repaired.
“Repair operations in such contested waters would take weeks or months, exposing governments and businesses to unprecedented economic losses estimated in the billions, which will eventually cause a severe global economic decline,” Mr Faqeeh added.
Mr Faqeeh
“Past incidents of unexplained cable cuts in the broader region, combined with Iran’s documented cyber and hybrid operations against critical infrastructure, underscore the credibility of these threats.”
The GDN has previously reported that Iranian attacks damaged Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE in early March, and more recently, the Oracle building in Dubai was targeted.
There are no reports thus far of submarine cables being cut in this conflict and Iran would risk severing its own connectivity in the process of deliberately dragging an anchor across the seafloor or directly attacking a landing station. However, the more likely threat is that of collateral damage.
The 2024 cable-cut happened after a cargo ship was struck by a Houthi missile, leading to a dropped anchor that cut three cables, according to Rest of World.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have been working on over-land or terrestrial fibre-optic routes through Syria, Iraq and East Africa to bypass the two maritime choke points of Bab el Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, however, these are also susceptible to tensions in politically unstable countries.
Derasat has called on the ITU to collaborate with the International Maritime Organisation and the UN Security Council to integrate cable protection into broader maritime security protocols, including mandatory real-time monitoring and rapid-response repair agreements for Hormuz-adjacent routes.
The Bahrain-based think tank also recommended that private sector cable operators must be incentivised to share threat intelligence and invest in protective technologies, such as distributed acoustic sensing along vulnerable segments.
naman@gdnmedia.bh
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