Official: Israeli gas drilling rigs cut off from supplies in war with Hezbollah

The Israel Electrical Company (IEC) will begin an exercise simulating power outages caused by attacks by Hezbollah, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.

These exercises are expected to last just under a week and a half and will include drills in restoring power, repairing damage to power generation facilities, dealing with hazardous materials incidents, air exercises and more.

The Israeli occupation forces’ gas drilling rigs in the Mediterranean are likely to be the main target of air and missile attacks by the Israeli resistance movement if the occupation forces engage in large-scale aggression against Lebanon. This possibility could be directly related to a video released by Hezbollah containing the coordinates of future targets near the occupied Palestinian coast.

An attack on these drilling platforms would cut off the Israeli occupying forces from their most important source of energy, as around 70 percent of their power plants use natural gas to generate electricity.

“Gas drilling rigs are sensitive, and when a rig is active it can turn into a ticking time bomb,” said Sami Turgeman, chairman of Noga, the Israeli independent energy management company.

“If a targeted missile hits it, we will certainly lose the rig and possibly the gas reservoir as well. The immediate action of the Israeli government would therefore be to stop gas production and empty the rigs, thereby making the pipeline irrelevant,” Turgeman explained.

“What if a missile hits the pipeline? We can call a plumber,” he said satirically, pointing out the severity of such a scenario.

In the scenario of a full-scale war, the Israeli occupying power will most likely have to rely on alternative energy sources and limit its consumption exclusively to diesel imports.

However, due to the sensitivity of the issue, the Israeli Energy Ministry did not provide any concrete details on the quantities of the various reserves.

The Israeli Ynet The news website stated that “almost everyone agrees that power supply disruptions and interruptions can occur in a state of war.”

Israeli media also report that the IEC is unable to fix electrical faults if the “danger is too great.”

According to Turgeman, Israeli authorities are still preparing to resolve severe power outages in the occupied territories.

Read more: Israel’s power grid will not survive war with Hezbollah, says Noga CEO