Joe Biden has said that his administration has been “discussing” possible Israeli plans to attack Iran’s oil industry in retaliation for the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Tuesday.
Biden’s off-the-cuff remark did not make clear whether his administration was holding internal discussions or talking directly to Israel, nor did he clarify what his attitude was to such an attack.
“First of all, we don’t ‘allow’ Israel, we advise Israel,” he told reporters outside the White House on Thursday. “And there is nothing going to happen today.”
Nonetheless, at a time of high tension across the Middle East, the comment triggered a spike in global oil prices, with potentially damaging effects on his vice-president Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidential election just over a month away.
US and Israeli officials have been talking about an appropriate Israeli response to an Iranian salvo of 181 ballistic missiles on Tuesday, most of which were intercepted though some landed on or around military bases. Satellite imagery published by the Associated Press on Thursday showed damage from four distinct impacts to buildings at Israel’s Nevatim airbase, one of the targets of the Iranian attack.
That attack was in turn a response to the Israeli killing of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday, as what had started as a war in Gaza a year ago ignited in recent days into a major regional conflict.
Biden has said that the US and its western allies in the G7 agree that Israel has a right to respond “proportionally”, and voiced his opposition to any strike against Iran’s nuclear programme.
Asked by a reporter on Thursday about the possibility of an Israeli strike against Iranian oil facilities, Biden replied: “We’re discussing that. I think that would be a little … anyway” – breaking off mid-sentence. A few minutes later, the oil price hit its highest level in a month, with Brent crude jumping as much as 5% to a high of $77.65 (£59.19) a barrel.
Any enduring price hike that raised the cost of petrol at pumps in the US – a near-certain outcome in the event of an actual Israel attack on the Iranian oil industry – would hurt Harris in an extremely close presidential race with Donald Trump.
Iran has informed Washington that a large-scale Israeli strike will lead in turn to Iranian attacks on Israeli infrastructure. Tehran also warned any other country assisting an Israeli attack would also make itself an Iranian target.
In a statement issued by Iran’s mission at the UN in New York, Iran said: “Should any country render assistance to the aggressor, it shall likewise be deemed an accomplice and a legitimate target.”
The warnings came as the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, sought assurances from Gulf leaders at a summit in Doha that they would remain neutral in the event of any joint Israeli-US attack in Iran.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said: “We intend to close the book on disagreements with Iran forever and develop relations between us like two friends.”
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His remarks underlined recent Saudi assurances that there will be no normalisation agreement between Riyadh and Israel without Israel’s agreement to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Any Israeli attack on Iranian oil facilities would raise global oil prices, potentially benefiting Gulf producers, but it could also affect their ability to export oil if the Israeli-Iran conflict led to the Persian Gulf being blocked.
In a joint press conference with Pezeshkian, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, said the crisis in the Middle East was a “collective genocide” and that his country had always warned of Israel’s “impunity”.
“It has become crystal clear that what is happening is genocide, in addition to turning the Gaza Strip into an area unfit for human habitation, in preparation for displacement,” he said during the Asia Cooperation Dialogue summit in Doha. The Qatari emir also affirmed his country’s “full support” for Lebanon against the “brutal attacks they are being subjected to”.
Posting to X on Thursday, he said the failure of the international community to stop the war on Gaza had been a green light to expand the conflict.
An Israeli airstrike in the early hours of Thursday morning, killed nine people when it hit a medical centre belonging to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation, in the second bombing of central Beirut so far this week.
Israeli military said it had killed the Hezbollah commander, Khader Shahabiya, who was deemed responsible for the bombing in July that killed 12 children and teenagers playing on a football pitch in the Golan Heights. Dozens more were wounded in the same rocket attack.
