Israeli Defence Minister Katz says the military will target all of Iran's infrastructure, including energy; an Iranian attack would free Israel from its existing limits

Threats against Iranian energy infrastructure sit in a well-worn escalation category: rhetorical maximalism from Israeli officials has historically preceded both limited strikes and, on rarer occasions, direct hits on Iranian assets, and the market's task in past episodes has been distinguishing deterrent signalling from operational intent. The conditional framing here, that an Iranian attack would remove existing limits, reads as deterrence rather than an imminent operation, a formulation Israeli officials have used repeatedly in prior rounds of this confrontation. The established transmission channel runs through crude first: the geopolitical risk premium in oil prices, with freight and insurance costs for Gulf shipments the tell that the threat is being taken seriously rather than merely heard. Gold and the traditional havens (JPY, CHF, USD) have tended to catch a bid on headline risk of this kind, with moves retracing when rhetoric fails to convert to action, a pattern repeated across multiple flare-ups in this theatre. The distinction that matters is between strikes on military or nuclear targets, which have historically produced sharp but faded moves, and actual damage to export or refining capacity, which is what would durably reprice energy. Worth watching are Iranian official responses, any movement in tanker rates and Gulf insurance pricing, and whether the rhetoric is echoed or walked back by other Israeli officials or Washington.