US forces struck Iran for a ninth straight day as fears mounted over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran said two oil tankers had exploded and were left immobilised.
US Central Command said in a statement that it had launched “a new wave of strikes” designed to “degrade” Iran’s capacity to attack commercial vessels using the strait’s crucial shipping lanes. It provided no additional details.
The bombardment marks another turn in an intensifying exchange between the US and Iran after an interim ceasefire signed a month earlier collapsed. The renewed fighting has sharpened the contest for control of the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting energy supplies and fuelling concern about inflation worldwide.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, citing reporters on the ground, said US missiles hit several Iranian cities early this morning.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington would keep striking Iran for as long as it continued attacking global commercial shipping.
“The Strait of Hormuz are international waterways, and they continue to launch against the ships in that international waterway,” Mr Rubio said.
“As long as Iran insists on controlling an international waterway, we’re going to have to respond to that. The United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution.”
Fears over the movement of energy supplies through the strait have lingered since hostilities resumed
Iran, meanwhile, said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had carried out a surprise attack on “the enemy’s special operations headquarters” in Syria’s Al-Tanf area.
The Revolutionary Guards also claimed to have fired ballistic missiles at US aircraft stationed at Jordan’s Aqaba airport.
Iranian state television reported early yesterday that Iran had previously launched a drone assault on US military assets and equipment at Kuwait’s Al-Adiri camp and Ali Al Salem air base.
Kuwait’s government said a desalination plant was hit for a second consecutive day, sparking a fire in what it described as a direct attack on essential civilian infrastructure.
Anxiety over energy shipments through the Strait of Hormuz has endured since the US and Iran returned to open conflict, with both sides accusing the other of repeatedly breaching the ceasefire agreement.
Late yesterday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said it had received a report of a vessel burning near the Omani coast, though it had not confirmed what caused the fire.
The Revolutionary Guards said today that two oil tankers exploded and were disabled after trying to navigate what it called an unsafe southern route through Hormuz. It alleged that the US military had encouraged the vessels to take that passage.
Reuters was unable to immediately verify the reported incident.
The statement did not identify the vessels or provide information about their flags, crews or possible casualties.
The Guards warned that the waterway would remain dangerous while what it described as US “aggression” in the region persisted, declaring that “this passage will not be safe for the transit of petrochemical products, nor even a single drop of oil and gas”.
LSEG data showed that four vessels travelled through Hormuz yesterday, compared with eight the day before.
Since Friday, at least three oil products’ tankers and one Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) have entered the strait to load oil, according to the data.
Oil prices climbed 2% today, rising above $90 a barrel.
In the latest US death reported during the war, the military said yesterday that a service member was killed on Saturday in northern Iraq, home to US military bases. The death occurred during the controlled detonation of what Central Command described as unexploded ordnance recovered from a downed Iranian attack drone.
The US military had earlier reported that two service personnel were killed in Jordan and a third was missing in action. US Central Command said yesterday that “unidentified remains” were discovered at the location of Friday’s attack and that “an examination process to verify the remains is ongoing”.
Those announcements raised the number of US military personnel killed since the conflict began to 17, while more than 420 others have been wounded.
The war began on 28 February, when the US and Israel attacked Iran in an effort to cripple Tehran’s nuclear and missile programmes and weaken its regional proxies. Thousands of people have since been killed, most of them in Iran and Lebanon.
