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Is­rael killed an­oth­er top Iran­ian of­fi­cial — the in­tel­li­gence min­is­ter — in its cam­paign against the Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic’s lead­er­ship and re­port­ed­ly at­tacked an Iran­ian off­shore nat­ur­al gas field Wednes­day amid the war’s es­ca­lat­ing pres­sure on the re­gion’s eco­nom­ic lifeblood: en­er­gy.

Iran has been strik­ing its Per­sian Gulf neigh­bours’ en­er­gy fa­cil­i­ties since the U.S. and Is­rael launched the war on Feb. 28 and has made the Strait of Hor­muz ship­ping chan­nel — through which one-fifth of the world’s oil trav­els — near­ly im­pass­able. On Wednes­day, an Iran­ian mis­sile hit a ma­jor nat­ur­al gas fa­cil­i­ty in Qatar.

The price of oil surged an­oth­er 5% to over $108 a bar­rel on in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets, in­creas­ing the price of gaso­line and oth­er goods, and squeez­ing the glob­al econ­o­my. The price of Brent crude, the in­ter­na­tion­al bench­mark for oil, is now up close to 50% since the start of the war.