Israel’s energy paradox: Regional influence, strategic vulnerability

For decades, Israel’s energy security was defined by scarcity. Lacking substantial domestic fossil-fuel production, it depended heavily on imported coal and oil while remaining largely disconnected from its neighbours’ energy systems. The discovery of the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields changed that equation. Israel became a gas exporter, strengthened its economic relationships with Egypt and Jordan and began presenting itself as an emerging energy hub in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Yet this transformation has produced a paradox.

The same offshore infrastructure that expands Israel’s regional influence also concentrates its energy security in a small number of exposed fields, platforms and pipelines. Gas has provided Israel with diplomatic leverage, but it has simultaneously created new forms of strategic vulnerability.

Gas as an instrument of regional influence

Israel’s gas diplomacy rests principally on three offshore fields: Tamar, Leviathan and Karish. Tamar supplies much of the domestic market, while Leviathan has become the main engine of exports to Egypt and Jordan. In 2024, Israeli gas exports to the two countries increased by 13.4 per cent, despite the continuing war in Gaza. Leviathan produced 11.33 billion cubic metres that year, while Tamar produced 10.09 bcm.

These flows carry significance beyond their commercial value. Jordan uses Israeli gas in its electricity system, while Egypt receives it for domestic consumption and, when market conditions permit, for processing through its liquefied natural gas facilities. Israel therefore no longer interacts with its neighbours only through military and political channels. It has inserted itself into their everyday energy calculations.

The relationship with Egypt has become particularly consequential. In December 2025, Israel approved a $35 billion agreement—first signed by the Leviathan partners in August—to supply approximately 130 bcm of gas to Egypt through 2040. The agreement coincided with declining Egyptian domestic production and growing demand, increasing the importance of Israeli gas to Egypt’s power system and industrial economy.

This is energy diplomacy in its most practical form: not declarations of friendship, but pipelines, purchase contracts and infrastructure that raise the economic cost of political rupture.

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Interdependence is not reconciliation

Energy trade may stabilise state-to-state relations, but it cannot resolve their political foundations. Egypt and Jordan maintain formal relations with Israel, yet public opposition to Israeli policies—particularly its war in Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory—remains substantial. Their gas relationships are therefore institutionally important but politically fragile.

This distinction matters. Energy interdependence can create incentives for governmental restraint while generating resentment at the societal level. If gas imports are perceived as strengthening Israel during war, commercial dependence may become a source of domestic political pressure rather than durable regional acceptance.

Israel’s gas diplomacy consequently produces functional integration without genuine reconciliation. Pipelines can connect electricity systems and industries, but they cannot manufacture political legitimacy.

Offshore strength, concentrated risk

The deeper contradiction lies in the physical geography of Israel’s energy power. Much of its gas production is concentrated in a limited number of offshore assets. These facilities are technologically sophisticated, but their concentration means that the disruption of one field can affect domestic electricity generation, export commitments and relations with neighbouring states.

This is no longer a theoretical danger. After the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, Israel temporarily suspended production at Tamar, reducing supplies to Egypt. During the Israel-Iran conflict in June 2025, Leviathan and Karish were shut for nearly two weeks, leaving Tamar as the principal operating field for domestic supply. The interruption affected Egyptian industries and forced Israel to prioritise its domestic market. The two fields reopened only after a new security assessment.

Further precautionary closures in 2026 again disrupted operations and forced Energean, the operator of the Karish field, to suspend its production outlook. Each shutdown exposed the same structural weakness: Israel’s regional energy influence depends on infrastructure operating within an active conflict environment.

The vulnerability is reciprocal. Egypt and Jordan face potential interruptions in Israeli supply, while Israel bears the contractual, financial and diplomatic consequences of failing to deliver. Exporting gas does not merely create dependence for the buyer; it also creates obligations for the seller.

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Europe remains an indirect opportunity

Israel has sought to link its gas strategy to Europe’s effort to diversify away from Russian supplies. Yet its most practical route to European markets is not a direct pipeline but cooperation with Egypt, whose liquefaction facilities can prepare the gas for export as LNG.

This arrangement gives Israel international reach without requiring it to construct an expensive standalone liquefaction system. It also reveals the limits of its ambition to become an energy hub. Israel possesses the gas, but Egypt controls much of the infrastructure needed to liquefy and redirect it. Their relationship is therefore one of asymmetric mutual dependence, not unilateral Israeli leverage.

Plans to expand Leviathan reinforce this strategy. Chevron and its partners have approved an expansion intended to raise the field’s total deliveries to approximately 21 bcm annually by the end of the decade. Greater capacity may increase export revenue and diplomatic influence, but it will also place a larger volume of production at risk from regional instability.

The political limits of energy power

Israel may strengthen transmission routes, expand storage and accelerate decentralised solar generation, but technical resilience cannot resolve a fundamentally political vulnerability. Offshore platforms can be protected, pipelines extended and supply contracts reinforced; none of these measures can insulate energy relations from a regional order shaped by occupation, war and the unresolved Palestinian question.

Yet gas can take Israel only so far. It may encourage governments to preserve functional relations even during political crises, but it cannot turn commercial dependence into genuine regional acceptance. Indeed, the deeper Egypt and Jordan become tied to Israeli supplies, the greater the domestic political cost when those flows are perceived as sustaining Israel during war.

Israel’s gas discoveries have undeniably altered the energy map of the Eastern Mediterranean. They have generated revenue, supported domestic electricity production and opened new channels of regional influence. Yet influence built on exposed offshore assets and politically contested relationships remains conditional.

The central question is therefore not how much more gas Israel can export, but whether energy transactions can overcome the political conditions surrounding them. So long as occupation and recurring war define Israel’s relationship with the region, pipelines may extend its economic reach without delivering strategic security. Israel’s energy paradox will persist: greater regional influence accompanied by deeper strategic vulnerability.

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