IRGC puts Hormuz’s undersea cables on the record as targets; the cable map disagrees

Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, political deputy to the IRGC commander-in-chief, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam television on Wednesday 21 October that if Iranian infrastructure were attacked, American and allied assets — explicitly including the undersea internet cables running through the Strait of Hormuz — could be targeted and destroyed. “The United States and its allies have substantial investments,” Javani said, in remarks carried the same day by the state-aligned Tasnim agency and by WANA. Earlier in the week IRGC spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebi made a parallel claim at a public event, referring to seven cables beneath the strait and saying that “all of the world’s internet and commercial data depend on them,” reported via Al Jazeera and relayed by Benzinga. Tom’s Hardware, sourcing The Telegraph, noted that one of the systems involved, AAE-1, runs 15,050 miles through Oman, the UAE and Qatar. No cable damage has been reported.

The numbers do not survive contact with the cable map. Iran International — a London-based Persian-language opposition outlet, and therefore an interested party — published a technical rebuttal on 21 October citing the International Cable Protection Committee: five active submarine cable segments pass through Hormuz, carrying less than one percent of the world’s international bandwidth. TeleGeography identifies three major systems on the route, AAE-1, FALCON and Gulf Bridge International; the principal Europe–East Asia paths run through the Red Sea. The Hormuz cables have long been routed through Omani waters for political reasons and mainly serve Iran’s neighbours. Polymarket, cited by Benzinga, was pricing a 4 percent probability that Iran or an aligned group physically damages undersea cable infrastructure by month-end and 12 percent by year-end — a betting pool’s signal, not a forecast. Iran International reported the same threat being floated by IRGC-linked media in April.

Assessment: Read the gap between seven cables and five, and between “all of the world’s data” and under one percent, as the point rather than an error. The threat is priced for an audience that will not check the ICPC’s register, and it costs nothing to repeat — which is why it has now been repeated twice in six months. Note also whose bandwidth sits on those strands: Iran’s Gulf neighbours and Iran itself, not Washington. Tehran has demonstrated it can switch off connectivity inside its own borders for months; it has demonstrated nothing about switching off anyone else’s. Watch for an actual fault, not another speech.