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One doesn't need a submarine to break, or "cut" a telecom cable. Bad anchoring can do it...bad fishing practices can do it (dragging trawl doors over unburied cable)

It can be grappled for, deliberately, from the surface. Cable repair ships retrieve the cables in that manner.
With enough ship & horsepower available, I bet I could find and break one, there in the shallow Persian Gulf waters. It would be pretty easy, actually.

I once saw an old [and then defunct] phone cable at the stern of the boat, draped over a trawl door --- and that was dragging it up out of 400+ fathoms of water! Someone had been there before we had, though, had snagged it, broke it, and left a bunch laying where it would be caught. I saw a kink in the cable...right near the door. Can't quite remember precisely how we got free of it, but we did, somehow.