A drone attack in the Egyptian city of Damietta damaged a U.S.-owned, Marshall Island-flagged floating gas storage tanker on Wednesday, marking a possibly significant escalation in Iranian-backed strikes in the region.
U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had briefed on the attack and repeated the threat he made earlier on Wednesday that the United States planned to hit Iran “hard” in response to the latest salvo of Iranian missile and drone strikes against U.S. forces in Jordan.
“It’s our turn to hit them,” Trump said. “They know it’s coming. They’re asking us not to do it.”
Egyptian authorities confirmed that there was a fire at the port and said that they were still investigating its causes without attributing it to a drone attack.
Reuters first reported that the explosion at the port, which caused no casualties, was the result of a drone attack, citing the maritime security firm Ambrey.
If confirmed, the attack would mark the first strike by Iran or its proxies against Egypt since the start of the conflict in February.
Ahmad Sharawi, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen most likely carried out the attack, which resembles Iranian attacks on civilian infrastructure elsewhere in the region.
“During the intense phase of the Iran War, they were targeting very sensitive, touristic sites in Dubai with drones,” Sharawi said. “They would send one drone, but that was a message that we can probably send 20 drones and destroy this building.”
“This attack might be a message to the Egyptians that we can reach the Suez Canal and we can really close the Suez Canal,” he told JNS.
Both Iran and the Houthis have threatened shipping in the Red Sea as an extension of their attempt to put a stranglehold on global energy supplies in the Strait of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia and other oil producers in the region have attempted to move that maritime traffic out of the Persian Gulf, with the Saudis shifting millions of barrels of daily oil exports to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
Damietta is about 30 miles northwest of Port Said, the northern entrance of the Suez Canal. About a $1 trillion in goods transits the canal annually, including a substantial portion of global oil and natural gas supplies.
Earlier in July, the Houthis declared a “maritime embargo” on Saudi Arabia and have recently said that they want to impose similar toll-like controls over the Bab al-Mandab Strait that Iran is seeking to gain over the Strait of Hormuz.
Sharawi said that Iran and its proxies may now be testing the reactions of countries around the region with threats to attack any potential export route for oil.
“If Bab al-Mandab is effectively closed or under threat, and the Suez Canal is under threat, and the Strait of Hormuz is under threat, then your only way out is the Mediterranean through Syrian territory, which is very volatile,” he told JNS.
“The Iranians and the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq can start attacking that lane—attacking the ports in western Syria,” he said. “At that point, there’s no way out for any of these countries to export their oil.”
Hours after the reported attack, Steve Witkoff, one of the lead U.S. negotiators with Iran, spoke with Egypt’s foreign minister and discussed “the latest regional developments and efforts to de-escalate the situation in the region.”
U.S. partners in the Middle East including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait have carried out covert strikes against Iran in response to attacks on their territory. U.S. Central Command said on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia joined U.S. strikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
Sharawi told JNS that Egypt might reconsider its previous reservations about carrying out military operations in the Red Sea following the attack.
“Egypt always tries to play this balancing act,” he said. “I don’t know if I can envision an Egyptian strike at the moment, but there will be added pressure on them to do something about this, especially since their territory was attacked.”
