“One of the unique aspects of this war is that, unlike in the past—when I received many calls from friends in Arab countries telling me to ‘stay safe’—this time I found myself calling quite a few friends to tell them to stay safe,” said Yossi Abu, CEO of NewMed Energy, the largest stakeholder in Israel’s Leviathan gas field.
The intense targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz may have rattled the energy sector, but Abu views the crisis as a historic opportunity to reshape regional dynamics—positioning Israel as the new “gateway to the Mediterranean.”
Under normal conditions, 25 million barrels of oil pass through Hormuz daily. However, with alternative routes like Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, the UAE’s Fujairah port, and uninterrupted flows from Iran and Oman, only about 16 percent of global oil production is actually stranded.
The natural gas market faces a far more severe crisis. In 2025, global LNG production reached 380 million tons. With Qatar (77 million tons) and the UAE (6 million tons) cut off, a full 20 percent of the world’s LNG supply is blocked. Because gas is significantly harder to store than oil, this bottleneck has triggered what Abu calls a “race for secure energy.”