How Israel's dream of being the Middle East's trade hub is unravelling

How Israel's dream of being the Middle East's trade hub is unravelling 

Submitted by
Ahmed Alqarout
on
Wed, 07/22/2026 - 15:45

Gulf powers are working out new corridors that would bypass the need to engage with Tel Aviv

A ship docks at the Emirati port of Jebel Ali on 18 June 2020 (Karim Sahib/AFP)

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The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) has died at its Israeli end. Gulf states and their allies are now racing to build rival lines.

In June, the Saudi and Turkish transport ministers signed memoranda to revive the Ottoman-era Hejaz railway as a corridor connecting their nations via Jordan and Syria - routed deliberately around Israel. And the UAE has opened talks on a trade route from the Syrian coast through Iraq to its own Gulf ports. 

And in July, DP World signed a 50-year concession with the Fujairah authorities to build two terminals on the UAE’s Arabian Sea coast, the Al-Rughailat container port among them, expressly so cargo can be landed and moved on without ever passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Both initiatives bypass the IMEC, which was announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023 - four weeks before the Gaza war began - and whose entire premise was Haifa as the gateway to Europe. 

Its backers still call it paused. But what is being built in its place sketches a regional order where trade is routed through everyone except Israel.

IMEC was Washington’s answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, carrying Indian goods across the sea to the UAE, overland by rail through Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and out of Haifa to Europe. Its foundation was Gulf-Israel normalisation, meant to give the Abraham Accords an economic spine. 

But developments in Gaza froze the Jordanian segment before a metre of track was laid, and put the political precondition beyond reach, with the Saudis rejecting normalisation absent recognition of a Palestinian state. 

The current war on Iran then did to the physical vision what Gaza had done to the political one, as Israeli ports and power stations came under sustained missile and drone fire. 

There was also the plain matter of size. The Haifa port handled around 1.5 million containers a year before the war - nowhere near the scale its promoters implied. Binding Gulf trade to Israel meant binding it to a country at permanent war and under-capacity.

Fault line

The Gulf powers have split along the fault line that already divided them. Saudi Arabia has spent a decade trying to make itself the point the region cannot bypass, and the war sharpened that effort. 

In March, Saudi Arabia Railways launched a dedicated freight corridor over 1,700 kilometres of existing line as a direct answer to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, linking King Abdulaziz Port, King Fahd Industrial Port and Jubail Commercial Port to the Jordanian border. 

Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi can keep drawing corridors, but until one of them can hold a route open against Israel, they are drawing maps - not building strategy

In addition, there is the east-west Petroline crude artery to Yanbu, which runs from the Abqaiq processing complex in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province to the Red Sea port, whose output Aramco pushed to a record seven million barrels a day in the first quarter of 2026.

If enough trade, oil and corporate command must physically cross the kingdom, it cannot be sidelined by Israel, Iran or anyone else. The June memoranda with Ankara extends that logic overland.

Abu Dhabi’s answer, meanwhile, bypasses both Israel and Saudi Arabia. Where Riyadh wants to be the one place trade must cross, Abu Dhabi is assembling routes touching as many shores as possible, depending on no single one. 

AD Ports Group has opened a line linking Khalifa Port to Iraq’s Umm Qasr, feeding the $17bn Development Road being laid from the Grand Faw Port in Basra up through Turkey to Europe, reaching the Mediterranean without crossing Saudi Arabia or entering Israel at all.

Iraq is pushing the same logic inland. In mid-July it unveiled an Energy City on the Faw peninsula, lashing refineries, gas plants and power stations to the Development Road, and pitched it in Houston to US energy majors from Chevron to Halliburton.

Emirati and Syrian officials have since opened talks to extend the corridor to Syrian ports, with a proposed logistics hub at al-Tanf crossing. To the east, the UAE is expanding the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, so that oil can reach tankers in Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman without transiting Hormuz. Completion is targeted for 2027.

Hard limit

Both models hit the same two walls. The first is scale: the volumes that make these routes worth fighting over move by sea, and land cannot replace it. One container ship carries up to 24,000 boxes. China Railway Express, the most developed overland freight network on earth, carried a record two million containers across the whole of 2024, and the China-Europe leg of it fell 22 percent in the first half of 2025 as sea freight cheapened. 

Cargo returns to the water whenever the water is open. Jebel Ali alone moved 15.5 million containers in 2024.

Umm Qasr, Iraq's main container port, handled about 1.5 million in 2023 and its channel is too shallow to take ships above roughly 5,000 containers. Its trade runs one way. Iraq's exports are almost all crude, which leave by tanker, not in boxes, so the bulk of outbound containers that arrive full go back empty. Overland corridors buy redundancy and political reach, but do not move the cargo.

The second wall is Iran. When Hormuz closed, Gulf output fell to around 7.5 million barrels of oil a day in March against a normal 20 million, and the UAE was among the most heavily struck of the Gulf states. Abu Dhabi’s response, beneath a public posture of deterrence, was reportedly to pay for Iranian protection. 

How the war on Iran is rewriting regional trade routes

Read More »

By mid-June, it had delivered more than $3bn to Tehran and agreed to release up to a total of $10bn in frozen funds in exchange for an end to the attacks, according to a Reuters report - a transfer Emirati officials categorically denied. Cargo clearance for Iranian goods stranded at Jebel Ali has since resumed. 

A power that sends money to the state that can close its ports, and keeps those ports open partly by carrying that same state’s goods, is not building independence but renting it. Meanwhile, Riyadh, which refused US requests to use Saudi airspace for strikes on Iran, had crude exports back to around 90 percent of prewar levels by early July as ties with Iran increased.

Refusing Israel a role as a trade hub is not the same as removing it as a factor. Israel retains what none of the corridor-builders have: the military capacity to reach out and degrade any route it dislikes - and it dislikes any route that strengthens its rivals or leaves it out. 

A century ago, regional projects for integration were broken one after another by imperial powers and by the state those powers planted at the junction of three continents. The names have changed and the maps are glossier, but the same dynamics are still at play.

During the Iran war, Israel sent an Iron Dome battery and its own crews to the UAE - the first time the system had gone beyond Israeli territory with troops attached, which means the state racing to build a corridor around Israel needed an Israeli battery to survive Iran’s missiles. 

Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi can keep drawing corridors, but until one of them can hold a route open against Israel, they are drawing maps - not building strategy.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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