IRGC commander General Yadollah Javani warns that seven submarine cables crossing the Strait of Hormuz could be destroyed and that Iran would suffer less disruption than Persian Gulf Arab states..

TEHRAN -- A senior commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said on Wednesday that internet cables running under the Strait of Hormuz will be targeted if Iran's infrastructure is attacked, warning that Persian Gulf states backing Washington will suffer "fatal" damage while Iran's losses will be minimal.

"If they want to damage our infrastructure, it is natural that the Islamic Republic will use all its power and their assets and properties, including internet cables — seven important cables that pass under the waters of the Strait of Hormuz — will be easily destroyed," Brigadier General Yadollah Javani, the IRGC’s deputy political chief, told Al-Alam television network.

Javani said Iran's adversaries suffered an "unimaginable" defeat during the period of "dignified defense," and that Tehran's response will now be "smart and at times offensive."

He said the shift in strategy aims to deter Washington permanently: "The aim is for America to rid itself of the thought of aggression forever."

He said U.S. bases in the region have been destroyed and could be destroyed at longer ranges, and that Iran's capabilities for offensive action against Americans, Europeans, the Israeli regime and countries supporting Washington have been fully demonstrated.

The remarks follow Qatari warnings that any damage to fiber-optic and submarine cables in the Persian Gulf would affect all countries, including Iran.

Javani dismissed the claim, saying Doha's losses would be "fatal" while Iran's would be "negligible."

"Qatar's claim of shared harm from cutting the cables comes at a time when Doha's loss is fatal and for Iran it is negligible," he said.

Analysts say the claim of symmetrical vulnerability misreads the architecture of the region's digital dependence.

About 95 to 99 percent of Qatar's international internet connectivity runs through submarine cables in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, with no structural diversification at national scale.

Persian Gulf Cooperation Council states have poured tens of billions of dollars into AI, cloud and hyperscale data centers requiring latency under 50 milliseconds and multi-terabit capacity — needs served almost exclusively by submarine cables.

Iran, by contrast, draws only about 30 percent of its international traffic through the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman. Roughly 70 percent transits terrestrial fiber through northern and western neighbors including Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In September 2026, Iran's Telecommunications Infrastructure Company attributed slowdowns in Tabriz and Babol to fiber cuts on Armenian soil. Iran's Border Gateway Protocol topology shows 79 external connections and 643 domestic autonomous systems, allowing rerouting under stress.

Iran's main terrestrial asset is the EPEG cable — the Europe-Persia Express Gateway — a roughly 10,000-kilometre route from Frankfurt through Eastern Europe, Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran to Muscat, with an initial 540 Gbps capacity and a design capacity of 3.2 Tbps, independent of the Red Sea and Suez.

Qatar's alternatives remain limited. The MEETS project, a 1,400-kilometre terrestrial network built on power-line ground wire linking Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar, is an intra-regional distribution network that must still hand traffic back to submarine landing stations to reach Europe or the U.S.

Iraq's 2,000-kilometre "Civilizations Road" fiber link from Faw to the Turkish border at Rabia became operational in July 2026, and Ooredoo Qatar has begun routing European traffic over it under a long-term capacity lease.

But analysts warn that concentrating national traffic on a single corridor through unstable geography risks congestion and periodic BGP failure.

Satellite backup is no substitute at scale. Starlink, commercially operational in Qatar since mid-2025, offers download speeds of 45 to 270 Mbps and uploads of 10 to 25 Mbps — against the 40 Tbps design capacity of the AAE-1 submarine system alone, a ratio of roughly one cable to hundreds of thousands of terminals.

The vulnerability extends beyond the moment of severance. Only about 63 specialist cable repair ships exist worldwide, with two to four stationed in West Asia. In peacetime, a repair takes at least 40 days and costs $1-3 million; during war, insurance suspension and security threats can delay it for months — as happened after three Red Sea cables were cut in early 2024 and early 2025.

For a country with 99 percent dependence, a multi-month outage means the collapse of financial infrastructure; for Iran, it means managed disruption across a distributed network.

Iran is also moving to convert geography into leverage. With the Strait of Hormuz just 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, the 12-mile territorial waters of Iran and Oman overlap entirely, leaving no international seabed in the strait — a legal argument Tehran is invoking under UNCLOS to press for transit fees from Western technology giants including Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft for cables passing through.

Tehran is also pushing to monopolize cable repairs in the zone through Iranian firms, seeking to control repair timelines and seabed access as a grey-zone tactic.

The difference between the two is the difference between managing disruption in a distributed system and the complete collapse of a centralized one.