 Israel behind attacks on Iranian gas pipelines, New York Times. Israel conducted clandestine strikes against two key natural gas pipelines in Iran this week, marking an escalation in the years-long standoff between the two states. The New York Times has reported Israel has long targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran. But this week's attacks on the energy infrastructure marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier. The New York Times wrote citing Western officials. The newspaper's anonymous sources also attributed a separate incident to Israeli sabotage, an explosion that rocked a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran, which local officials ruled an accident. The two gas pipelines run for more than 1,000 kilometers and carry around 57 million cubic meters. The blasts temporarily took out around a sixth of Iran's daily natural gas production, causing local outages. While Iran has said the damage was minor and the repairs were finished soon, the strikes were a stark warning of the kind of damage Israel could inflict, one of the New York Times's sources said. Given the vast distances and varied terrain and pipelines run and the regular Iranian patrols inside knowledge of the system would have been needed to carry out the sabotage, an Iranian official told the paper.