How the war on Iran is rewriting regional trade routes

The 1,700 km route connects King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam, King Fahd Industrial Port in Jubail (KFIP) and Jubail Commercial Port directly to Jordan and beyond. Each train carries over 400 containers. Transit time is cut in half compared to road haulage. This is not a rival project to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) which remains stuck in diplomatic paralysis. It is the IMEC, the same framework, but taking a different route. The IMEC was announced at the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi as a counter to China's Belt and Road Initiative. It envisioned an integrated rail and shipping corridor from India through the UAE and Saudi Arabia, across Jordan and Israel, and onwards to Europe via the Mediterranean. The UAE was positioned as the entry point for Asian cargo into the Gulf. Israel, through its Haifa port, was widely presented as the bridge to Europe. But Israel was never a signatory to the original IMEC memorandum of understanding. The MoU, as signed, involved Saudi Arabia and the UAE as the core land-side parties. Israel's centrality to the corridor was largely an Israeli projection, an ambition that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government worked to insert into the corridor's narrative rather than a formal commitment any other party had signed up to. No deal was concluded with India. No deal was concluded with the Gulf states. Israel was positioning itself as an indispensable node. The US-Israel war on Iran has exposed that positioning as exactly that. What is replacing them is being built on different terms, through different capitals, and with a different logic. From Abu Dhabi to Riyadh and Doha Six weeks before the SAR corridor went live, Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani) and Qatar Ports Management (Mwani) signed a memorandum of understanding covering eight areas of cooperation, from joint maritime corridors and shared regional distribution centres to digital transformation and coordinated positioning in international maritime bodies. The agreement is explicit about land and sea connectivity between Saudi and Qatari ports and the study of joint logistics investment opportunities. The India-Middle East Corridor: A new Silk Route or diplomacy by PowerPoint? Read More » Shipping from Qatar's Hamad Port to Saudi Arabia takes less than 24 hours. Transit through Saudi northward to Jordan is now live by rail. The corridor's new logic runs through Riyadh and Doha. Asian cargo moving by sea arrives at Gulf ports and feeds into Saudi Arabia's expanding rail network, which carried over 30 million tonnes of freight in 2025 across a 5,500 km integrated system. The North-South Railway, stretching 1,250 km from Riyadh to the Jordanian border, was originally built for phosphate and minerals. It is now a container freight artery connecting maritime gateways on the Arabian Gulf to the Levant and the Mediterranean rim. The UAE has not been excluded. It has been repositioned. Abu Dhabi is no longer the Gulf's primary entry funnel for eastbound cargo heading north. That role is being absorbed by Saudi and Qatari port capacity while the UAE finds itself operationally constrained by the Strait of Hormuz crisis that has effectively shut down the waterway since 28 February. With Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) enforcing selective passage, tanker traffic has dropped by over 90 percent in the first weeks of March. Jebel Ali, the Middle East's largest container port, is experiencing congestion from diverted vessels. Major carriers including Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA CGM and MSC have all suspended Hormuz transits. The UAE's hub model depends on the free flow of maritime traffic. That flow is now at Iran's discretion. Since Tehran first closed the strait last June, Ankara has intensified efforts to promote Turkey as a stable alternative trade corridor. Other ideas floated included having the UAE, a big global player in container shipping and port terminals, build a new port in either Gaza or on the nearby Egyptian coast, as well as develop a free-trade zone in the war-shattered strip. Exit points, not entry points Where the UAE retains influence is at the corridor's exit points, not its entry. In February, Abu Dhabi's AD Ports Group signed a 30-year concession to manage and operate Jordan's Aqaba Multipurpose Port, the country's only general cargo seaport. Aqaba handles roughly 80 percent of Jordanian exports and 65 percent of imports. Abu Dhabi's role has shifted from gatekeeper to downstream operator It is also a transit point for goods heading to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. AD Ports will hold 70 percent of the joint venture. The port has an annual capacity of 11 million tonnes and in 2025 handled over 5.3 million tonnes of cargo. This is Jordan's dominant trade gateway, now under Emirati operational control. Further northwest, Dubai's DP World holds a 30-year, 800m concession for Tartus on Syria's Mediterranean coast. DP World commenced operations in November, making Tartus deal one of the largest international logistics investments in Syria in years. Separately, AD Ports acquired a 20 percent stake in Latakia International Container Terminal, Syria's main container facility, which is operated by France's CMA CGM under a parallel 30-year deal worth 230 million (265m). Latakia handles over 95 percent of Syria's container traffic, with capacity set to expand from 250,000 TEU to 625,000 TEU by end of 2026. The UAE's port footprint thus runs along the Mediterranean terminus of the corridor. Aqaba in Jordan, Tartus Latakia in Syria, and Jeddah port partial ownership. But the corridor's interior, from the Gulf coast to the Jordanian border, is Saudi-operated, Saudi-built, and increasingly Saudi-Qatari in its logistics architecture. Abu Dhabi's role has shifted from gatekeeper to downstream operator. Diversification or normalisation? From Jordan, the route diversifies. One path runs northwest into Syria, where Tartus and Latakia now offer Mediterranean access under UAE and French operations. This is the route most immediately viable for commercial cargo heading to southern Europe and North Africa. A proposed high-speed rail link from northern Saudi Arabia into Syria would eventually harden this into permanent infrastructure. One path continues north to Turkey. Haifa Port, Gautam Adani and Israel's plan for the Middle East Read More » The other path runs west into Israel. Haifa port, acquired by India's Adani Ports in 2022 for 1.18bn in a 70-30 joint venture with Israel's Gadot Group, was the IMEC's original Mediterranean anchor. In 2025, Haifa processed around 500,000 TEU. But the port is now operating in a warzone. Since 28 February, Iran has launched sustained missile and drone barrages targeting Israel, including Haifa. Adani has confirmed the port is operational, but the strategic viability of routing international trade through an active conflict zone is a different question entirely. Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants oil and gas to flow through Israel post-Iran war. What makes the Israel fork interesting is not Haifa's physical condition but its ownership chain. In February, Germany's Hapag-Lloyd agreed to acquire Israel's ZIM Integrated Shipping for 4.2bn. Hapag-Lloyd's shareholder register is instructive. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund holds 10.2 percent. Qatar's Investment Authority holds 12.3 percent. Hence, together, Gulf sovereign wealth funds control over a fifth of the company that is now absorbing Israel's national carrier. Once the acquisition closes in late 2026, Riyadh and Doha will hold indirect but material leverage over shipping capacity that includes Haifa's networks. This is not normalisation as Israel imagined it to be. The distinction matters. The IMEC, as Israel imagined it, required a UAE-Israel axis with Israeli inclusion as the single Mediterranean exit, which would have made regional trade structurally dependent on Arab-Israeli normalisation. What is being built now has multiple exit points. Tartus, Latakia, Aqaba, and potentially Gaza and Israeli ports alongside them, with Lebanon possibly joining in future phases. When three or four parallel exit countries exist, none of them can hold the corridor hostage. That is diversification. Any future logistical cooperation with Israel would constitute a form of economic normalisation in the broadest sense. Nonetheless, there is a difference between normalisation as an irreversible strategic destination (as desired by Israel) and normalisation as a controlled, limited and reversible input. What Saudi is constructing, if Israeli ports are eventually included, falls squarely in the second category. Saudi has shown no indication it is moving toward the kind of normalisation Israel desires anytime soon. Netanyahu has invoked the prospect of Saudi normalisation as a way to extract political dividends from his regional military campaign, framing it as a pathway to regional integration. That framing has no basis in anything Riyadh has signalled. The architecture is designed so that any Israeli access to the corridor remains a variable Riyadh can dial up or down depending on political conditions, not a fixed dependency the kingdom cannot reverse. A new trade architecture The original IMEC route was designed as a normalisation corridor. Its viability depended on Saudi-Israeli diplomatic rapprochement, the resolution or sidelining of the Palestinian cause, and a stable security environment from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean. Israel is not excluded by design. It is simply not guaranteed inclusion by design either. That is a very different situation from where it thought it stood two years ago None of these conditions exist. What has emerged instead is a trade architecture that diversifies regional connectivity rather than anchoring it on a single normalisation framework. There are no guarantees for any country's inclusion. IMEC was never a fixed treaty with guaranteed slots. It is a framework being built incrementally. Whether Israeli ports end up as active nodes depends on how the war on Gaza ends, how Syria stabilises, what happens in Lebanon, and whether any of the alternative routes prove more commercially attractive. The architecture is open. Israel is not excluded by design. It is simply not guaranteed inclusion by design either. That is a very different situation from where it thought it stood two years ago. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has accelerated Saudi Arabia's overland infrastructure programme. The destruction of the IMEC's political preconditions has forced corridor logic away from the Israel route and towards Syrian and Jordanian alternatives. The IMEC is not dead. It is being rebuilt. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. War on Iran Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0