The United Arab Emirates carried out covert military strikes inside Iran during the 72-day war, including a major attack on the Lavan Island refinery in the Persian Gulf, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing officials in three governments familiar with the operations. The Lavan strike, the paper said, occurred in early April and triggered a fire that took down most of the refinery's production for several months.
The disclosure recasts the Gulf state — long described as Iran's primary regional target during the war — as an active combatant, and forces a rereading of the conflict's opening weeks. Emirati officials have not publicly confirmed the report; the UAE foreign ministry referred questions to the Ministry of Defence, which has not commented. The Iranian foreign ministry described the WSJ account as "Western propaganda" in a Tuesday afternoon briefing in Tehran.
The Lavan Island refinery, operated by the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company, is one of Iran's smaller crude-processing facilities — roughly 30,000 barrels a day at full capacity — but is strategically positioned at the southern edge of the Persian Gulf, within Emirati strike range and near the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz. Satellite imagery analysed by Maxar in April showed extensive damage to the facility consistent with a hit on the catalytic-cracking unit.
According to officials cited by the Journal, the operation involved a small number of Emirati F-16E Block 60s flying at low altitude through the Strait, supported by US-supplied air-to-ground munitions. The strike was reportedly cleared in advance with Israel, which provided intelligence support, but was deliberately not publicly attributed to give the Emiratis political cover with their Iranian-aligned Shia population and with Oman, which had been hosting the early ceasefire mediation track.
The revelation lands on the same day that US Ambassador Mike Huckabee disclosed Israel's transfer of Iron Dome batteries to the Emirates. Together, the two disclosures point to a degree of Israeli-Emirati military integration far beyond what the public framing of the Abraham Accords has previously acknowledged — a shift that Gulf analysts have privately predicted for several years but which has now landed in print, with sources, in the same news cycle as Trump's Beijing trip.
The strikes happened, the Journal said, "around the time President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire", suggesting they were timed to consolidate Emirati leverage before the diplomatic phase opened. Whether they were a precondition for the original April truce or — as Tehran is now arguing — a violation of it, is the subject of contested briefings in three Gulf capitals.
Senior US officials, briefed on the WSJ report in advance, declined to add to it. A State Department spokesperson said only that the United States "remains in close coordination with all partners in the region" and that questions about Emirati operations were "for the UAE government to address". Brent crude, trading above $107 a barrel before the report, did not move materially on the disclosure.