Iran's IRGC Political Deputy says Iran will target internet cables in the Strait of Hormuz if its infrastructure is attacked, Mehr reports

Iran's IRGC Political Deputy says Iran will target internet cables in the Strait of Hormuz if its infrastructure is attacked, Mehr reports.

Threats of this kind from IRGC-affiliated officials are a recurring feature of Gulf escalation cycles and have historically been priced first through the oil channel: a risk premium into crude, a widening of tanker insurance and freight rates for Hormuz transits, and bid for haven FX. The established pattern is that rhetoric alone fades without a kinetic trigger; what has durably repriced markets in comparable episodes is an actual interdiction, a seized vessel, or a US military response, not the verbal escalation that precedes it. The novelty here is the named target set. Past Iran threats have centred on tankers and the closure of the strait, which is a crude flow problem; subsea cables are a data and financial connectivity problem, and Gulf cable cuts would transmit through telecoms redundancy and regional exchange infrastructure rather than through energy balances, a channel with little direct precedent and therefore little established pricing template. The conditional framing matters: the threat is explicitly tied to an attack on Iranian infrastructure, which makes the tell any sign of imminent US or allied military action rather than the cable rhetoric itself. Worth watching are shipping advisories and tanker behaviour in the strait, the US official response, and whether the threat is repeated by higher levels of the Iranian command structure, since elevation of talking points up the chain has historically been the signal that separates posturing from intent.