The Gulf states currently find themselves living their worst nightmare.

Decades of diplomatic maneuvering to avoid direct military confrontation with Iran are going up in smoke from Tehran’s ballistic missile and drone attacks on all members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Since the US and Israel launched their bombing campaign targeting the Iranian regime over the weekend, estimates indicate that Iran has fired more ballistic missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbors than at Israel itself, damaging US military assets as well as tourist and energy sites.

According to data released by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies on Wednesday, Iran fired more than twice as many missiles and about twenty times more drones toward Gulf states than at Israel, with the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait facing nearly 200 ballistic missiles each.

Iran hopes that by inflicting enough pain on its Arab neighbors — and other countries further afield — it will pressure US President Donald Trump to end the war.

But not only has that strategy not worked so far; it may end up backfiring spectacularly, pushing Gulf states toward closer security cooperation with Israel — even among those who remain wary of openly aligning with the Jewish state.

Closer to CENTCOM, closer to Israel

Israel has long argued that the Iranian regime’s weapons programs threaten not only Israel, but the whole region and world. That contention is now emphatically reinforced by this week’s attacks, strengthening the case for Gulf cooperation with Israel, at least on the security level.

“The fact that Arab countries and Arab allies were targeted just goes to show that the Iranian regime doesn’t only pose a threat to Israel,” a spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry told The Times of Israel while briefing reporters at the site of an Iranian missile attack in central Tel Aviv on Sunday.

However, the extent to which Israel is providing military or civilian assistance to the Gulf to counter that threat remains difficult to verify.

When asked by The Times of Israel if Jerusalem was sending any assistance to help those Arab countries defend themselves, the spokesperson was elusive, saying only, “We are doing everything possible to meet the objective of this operation, and this operation is working and happening hand in hand with our American friends.”

The IDF spokesperson’s unit declined to comment on what kind of military assistance, if any, Israel provided to the Gulf states ahead of or after the start of the strikes on Iran, called Operation........

© The Times of Israel