A strike hit Fujairah port on the UAE's eastern coast overnight Wednesday, according to Al Jazeera. Fujairah is The Gulf's primary ship-to-ship fuel bunkering hub and the exit terminal for the Habshan–Fujairah pipeline — a 370-kilometre line carrying 1.5 million barrels per day of Abu Dhabi crude from the Habshan field to The Gulf of Oman coast, bypassing the strait of Hormuz entirely.
Abu Dhabi built the pipeline between 2008 and 2012 at a cost of $3.29 billion, with a design capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day, for precisely this scenario. After Iran threatened to close the strait during the standoffs of 2008 and 2011–2012, ADNOC funded the line as a strategic hedge — a way to keep Emirati crude flowing to Asian buyers even if Hormuz became impassable. For fourteen years it functioned as Abu Dhabi's guarantee that the strait's vulnerability was not the emirate's. That guarantee is now void.
Iran has struck every major Gulf energy export pathway over five days: production at Qatar's Ras Laffan, refining at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura, maritime transit through Hormuz — where traffic has fallen 80% — and now the overland bypass at Fujairah. The sequence maps Iran's pre-war threat doctrine onto operational reality. Tehran's military planners have discussed closing all Gulf export routes in Iranian strategic literature for two decades; the Fujairah strike confirms they built the targeting packages to execute it.
The UAE's defence ministry separately released cumulative intercept figures for the first time: 165 ballistic missiles, 2 cruise missiles, and 541 drones since the conflict began. Kuwait reported 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones. Combined, two states alone have intercepted more than 1,000 projectiles — a sustained salvo rate exceeding what most open-source assessments of Iranian munitions stocks projected beyond 72 hours. What the figures do not show is how many were not intercepted. Fujairah, the US consulate in Dubai, Ras Tanura, and Ras Laffan all absorbed hits. The intercept rates are high but not total, and the strikes that land are destroying infrastructure that took years and billions of dollars to build.
