Eve here. We sometimes post Simon Watkins articles, as we do, to give our readers a window into hardcore neocon thinking about the Middle East. Remember that Watkins does not create ratings from the whole fabric. For example, his contacts really believe that Israel has the ability to eliminate all major Iranian nuclear sites that actually support potential weapons development. Most readers know that many experts who seem to be very knowledgeable about the area have argued against it. We know that Iran’s important nuclear enrichment sites and many sites with traditional missiles are deep underground, far from reach of nuclear attacks. However, Watkins continues to portray his assessment as reasonable by working in the 2012 (no typos) Congressional Research Services Analysis. help me.
Nevertheless, he lists two points worth considering. First, it is politically necessary for Netanyahu to proceed with a proactive liquidation of Gaza. He will refrain until Trump completes his Middle East tour. Two is that Watkins argues that if Israeli attacks are ugly enough, OPEC members could re-run the embargo of the 1970s. Just as the resulting high prices especially hurt poor households, the economic damages that come with the resulting tariff-bearing pain are a proper punishment for the US and Trump, particularly to stop the enormous genocide in Gaza and to do squats to intensify ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
The ghosts of hungry children appear to have created even more surprising hostility towards genocide… Even in Israel:
Tonight in Jerusalem, people holding pictures of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. This particular form of protest is growing weekly. sufficient. pic.twitter.com/fb2v9bgaq4
– Amidar (@amidar) May 10, 2025
Another wildcard also has an increase in internal opposition to Netanyahu’s escalation track at advanced levels in Israel.
Tonight in Jerusalem, people holding pictures of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. This particular form of protest is growing weekly. sufficient. pic.twitter.com/fb2v9bgaq4
– Amidar (@amidar) May 10, 2025
Simon Watkins, a former FX trader and salesman, financial journalist and bestselling author. He was head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then head of weekly publications, Chief Leiter at Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products at Pratt, and Global Managing Editor of Research Editor at Renaissance Capital in Moscow. It has been originally published Oil price
- Israel is preparing a major Gaza operation that could force civilians to relocate and force the risk of escalating tensions in the region.
- The geopolitical flashpoint is intensifying, and Israel is reportedly ready to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.
- The World Bank warns that massive Middle Eastern supply disruption could raise oil prices by 56-75%.
The next step in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for Gaza could be the beginning of the final game of the ongoing Israeli-Hamas war, which poses the most risky for the global oil market. According to his statement on May 5, he said Israel was “on the eve of a fierce entry into Gaza” and that “they would not enter or leave” territory where thousands of additional Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) units were drafted for the mission.
At the same time as a new IDF attack on Hamas in Gaza, Israeli soldiers force some or all of Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinian civilians, or in small areas south. Humanitarian assistance is distributed through private companies as UN agencies say they will not cooperate because they view the program as violating the principles of humanitarian assistance. The aim is to free the remaining 24 living hostages in Gaza and to deport 35 bodies of 251 hostages filmed during Hamas’ attack on Israel during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, but some have seen this latest Israeli permanent replacement with Palestinian Israeli settlers.
The exact timing of this plan will depend on the final outcome of President Donald Trump’s upcoming visits to the key Arabic nations of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. However, there is no doubt that Gaza’s new plans will unfold soon in any case. owrprice.com This is the first time since Netanyahu’s May 5th statement. “Netanyahu was told by his important parliamentary supporters that if he didn’t move on, they would defeat him,” said one of the London-based sources.
If Trump fails to fully persuade the three Arab countries, one course that could result in them being offered by their greatest benefits by escaping the intense drama of Gaza is the embargo on oil exports from OPEC, which prompted the 1973/74 oil crisis, as fully analyzed in my latest book. New Global Oil Market Order. Certainly, the parallels between the onset of current events in the Middle East and the onset of events that preceded the 1973 oil crisis are strange. At that time, Egyptian forces moved to the Sinai Peninsula, while Syrian forces moved to two territories captured by Israel during the six-day war in 1967. This was the same multi-directional attack method and religious date as the Hamas attack on October 7, which Hamas used 50 years later on targets across Israel.
The 1973 attacks by two major Arab states on Israel attracted further Islamic countries in the region as the conflict became religious-centric rather than simply reclaiming lost territory. Military and other support came to Egypt and Syria from Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait and Tunisia before the war ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire on October 25, 1973.
But that broader sense of the conflict did not end there. Embargo on oil exports to the US, UK, Japan, Canada and the Netherlands was imposed by major OPEC members, particularly Saudi Arabia, in response to the collective supply of arms, intelligence resources and logistics support to Israel during the war. By the end of the March 1974 embargo, oil prices had risen about 267%, up from about USD 3 (PB) per barrel to nearly 11p. This caused a global economic slowdown fire, especially felt in the western net oil importing countries.
There is also an Iranian response to consider, given that Hamas is one of the important proxies in the region. Until relatively recently it was still engaged in a series of intense military strikes against Israel, but warned that more would come, depending on the seriousness of the way Israel dealt with Hamas, a major region of Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has long threatened to end the constant and extraordinary threat of owning Iranian nuclear weapons by launching direct attacks on major nuclear facilities.
Donald Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he supports such a strike. On October 4th, the then presidential candidate said: [facilities] First, I’ll worry about the rest later. “In response to then-US President Joe Biden’s refusal to support the idea of Israel’s attacks on these Iranian sites following Tehran-oriented attacks on Israel, Trump added: That’s the biggest risk we have. The biggest risk we have is the nuclear… Soon they will have nuclear weapons. And you have a problem. ”
For a long time, Israel had a complete military operational plan to attack and destroy all major Iranian sites related to the development of nuclear weapons capabilities. Some of this is done through a combination of technology and human intelligence, but the larger elements need to be carried out through air attacks. The 2012 US Congressional Research Services (CRS) report analyzed nuclear sites or similar targets of Iranian Natanz, Esfahan and Arak in logistics terminology, but it would likely require 90 tactical fighters, but assuming a margin of about 10% for reliability, 100 is required.
At the time of reporting, Israel had around 350 fighter jets, and that number has risen considerably since. To avoid potential problems with Israeli aircraft across sovereign spaces in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and/or Syria, the report added that aircraft could use Turkey as a member to strengthen Azerbaijan assets and use them as stage posts.
That said, there are all signs that Israel has significantly expanded its military assets in Azerbaijan following the escalation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2023. Israel used a US-made 2,000 pound BLU (Bomb Live Unit)-109 invasion bomb on September 27th last year to kill Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrara. His bunker was only 100 feet underground compared to more than 300 feet of Iran’s nuclear equipment, but the report added in 2012: Aside from these logistical considerations, the fact remains that Iran clearly believes Israel can pull it apart, like Tehran. Nuclear facilities have been closed.
A further significant decline in oil supply due to OPEC members and disruptions in the addition of major oil transport routes in the Middle East could have extreme consequences for oil prices.
In the early stages of the first Israeli-Hama conflict, the World Bank set the scope of oil price scenarios according to the stage of risk. “Small chaos” said global oil supply would fall from 500,000 to 2 million bpd (almost the same decline seen during the 2011 Libyan civil war) and that oil prices would rise 3-13% first. “Medium Confusion” – including 3-5 million bpd of supply losses (almost equivalent to the 2003 Iraq War), oil prices will rise by 21-35%. And “massive disruption” – supply characterized by a decline of 6 million to 8 million bpd (as in the decline seen in the 1973 oil crisis) – will raise oil prices by 56-75%.
