A large-scale attack on Iran’s power sector is more feasible than taking out every single bridge in the country, experts said.
A majority of Iran’s power plants and refineries are located in three coastal provinces – Bushehr, Khuzestan and Hormozgan – on the Persian Gulf. Striking power plants in the region could deal the Iranian regime a significant blow, said Miad Maleki, a former senior US treasury official who led sanctions against Iran.
“You do anything to those three provinces, you cut the regime’s access to oil revenue [and] its access to the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz,” said Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.
In another development around the negotiations on Tuesday afternoon, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif urged Trump to extend his deadline by two weeks to allow more time to strike a deal.
“To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture,” Sharif said in a post on X.
Pakistan has emerged as a key interlocutor between the US and Iran, with Islamabad floated as a possible location for high-level talks if the countries appear close to reaching a ceasefire deal.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Trump had “been made aware of the proposal” from Pakistan’s prime minister. Leavitt said the US would respond soon. Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that the US and Iran were in the middle of “heated negotiations.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Vice-President JD Vance had confirmed that the US carried out airstrikes on military targets on Kharg Island, a key island in the Persian Gulf that handles roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports.
Speaking to reporters in Budapest, Vance said those strikes did not represent a change in Trump’s strategy. He said negotiations with Iran would continue until Trump’s deadline but warned that the US could inflict “much greater pain” on the country’s economy.
“So they’ve got to know, we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use. The president of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them, if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.”
The White House dismissed reports that Vance’s comments contained any suggestion of a US nuclear strike against the Islamic republic.
