Cairo confirms drone set US gas terminal ablaze in Damietta

A drone struck the American floating gas terminal Energos Winter at its berth in Damietta, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, at 14:20 GMT on Wednesday, July 29, and the fire jumped from it to the LNG carrier Gaslog Salem moored in the same basin. The strike is closer to Serbia than the map suggests. Damietta is one of the outlets through which eastern Mediterranean gas reaches the European market, and Serbian supply is tied to that market through the interconnector with Bulgaria and the LNG terminals in Greece, the one route that bypasses Russian pipelines.

What happened at the quay

The explosion was first reported by Ambrey, a British maritime security firm. The crew of the Energos Winter was evacuated and the vessel itself was pulled away from the quay before the fire was put out, because it is a floating storage and regasification unit, a hull that holds gas in liquid form at deeply sub-zero temperatures. The smaller fire aboard the Gaslog Salem was extinguished by the crew.

Not a single seafarer was hurt. The Energos Winter sails under the flag of the Marshall Islands, carries IMO 9256614 and is American-owned and American-operated. The Gaslog Salem is a Bermuda-flagged LNG carrier, IMO 9638915.

Egypt’s cabinet said that “preliminary investigations by the relevant authorities found that the incident was caused by a drone”. The Oil Ministry said no one was injured in the fires and that “the situation was handled immediately in accordance with emergency and rapid response plans”. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi warned of the danger of regional escalation. The shipping agency Inchcape reported the same evening that port operations were continuing at the remaining berths.

Who sent the drone?

No one has claimed the attack, on either of the two nights since. Iran denied any role, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi turned the accusation toward Israel while making a point of the relationship with Cairo:

Egypt is an important friend and partner in the region and its security is of utmost importance to us.

Alongside that line, Araghchi warned of Israeli false-flag operations. The foreign ministry run by Yemen’s Houthis was far shorter: “There is no truth to the rumours.” The Houthis maintain that they strike only targets in Saudi Arabia.

A terminal that was about to come back

Damietta was built for export, but it ran well below capacity for years because Egyptian domestic demand swallowed the gas that used to leave by ship. Eni and TotalEnergies then took a final investment decision to develop the Cypriot gas field Cronos and pipe it to Damietta, which would restore the terminal’s export role and give Cyprus its first commercial outlet.

So the hit did not land only on two hulls. It landed on the node around which the European Union has been building its arithmetic for gas that arrives neither from Russia nor through Suez, and that node now enters underwriters’ tables as a place that has already burned once.

American assets on someone else’s soil

Damietta is the first strike on Egyptian soil since the war began, and Egypt is not a belligerent. The same pattern repeated two days later in Kuwait, where drones of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hit the Ahmad al-Jaber air base, striking hangars, satellite communications systems and equipment warehouses. Kuwait is not a belligerent either.

Between those two dates, overnight into Thursday, US Central Command struck dozens of Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran:

• Qeshm island, where three people died in a residential building
• Kish island
• the provinces of Fars, Bushehr and Khuzestan
• Hormozgan province

What links Damietta to Ahmad al-Jaber is not the perpetrator, since no one has named one, but the address. In both cases the target was American property sitting on the territory of a state that is not fighting this war, which pushes the burden of defending it onto a host that never asked for the job. Cairo spent years building a position as a regional mediator, and it held that position precisely by neither firing nor being fired upon. Half of that equation has now broken.

What comes next

The first measurable trace of strikes like this one usually shows up not in statements but in war-risk premiums for shipping in the eastern Mediterranean, which underwriters revise after every incident involving a burning gas carrier. The second will be the work schedule on the Cronos-to-Damietta link, because the Eni and TotalEnergies investment decision rests on a terminal that, until Wednesday, no one counted as a target from the air.

Egypt’s investigation into the drone’s origin is not finished and Cairo has named no suspect. Until it does, two fire-marked ships sit in the port at the mouth of the Nile, next to a question that neither Tehran nor Sanaa will answer.