Iran hits back after US strikes, Gulf on alert
US strikes nearly 140 Iranian targets as Tehran retaliates across the Gulf, pushing ceasefire efforts closer to collapse
The United States attacked Iran early Sunday morning over an Iranian strike on a vessel in the Strait of Hormuz that set the container ship ablaze and forced its crew to abandon it.
Iran responded with attacks targeting several countries in the Middle East, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Jordan.
The burst of fighting raised new questions about efforts to reach a permanent end to a war that began on Feb 28.
The strait, a key transit route for oil and natural gas, has become the key sticking point in negotiations, and repeated fighting over the past week has left negotiations in danger of collapse.
The US military’s Central Command said it hit some 140 targets in Sunday’s strikes and went after missile and drone launch sites, ammunition dumps, communication equipment and other sites.
It said the attacks, heavier than previous attacks in recent days, would weaken Iran’s ability to threaten civilian shipping. “Iran made a poor choice. Now they pay,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote online.
Semiofficial Iranian news agencies reported that a navy officer was killed by the early morning attack. Iran retaliated by attacking nations in the region hosting US military forces, while insisting it alone must control the strait and potentially charge vessels for travelling through it.
“The era of one-sided deals is OVER,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and a main negotiator, wrote Sunday. “We told you: keep your word or pay the price. Reality is knocking.”
Iran and the US agreed to an interim ceasefire on June 17, beginning a 60-day period aimed at reaching a permanent end to the war, which US President Donald Trump declared “over” three days ago. Negotiations have been repeatedly disrupted by violence. The US has launched three rounds of airstrikes targeting Iran in the last week over Iranian attacks on ships heading through the strait using a route seeking to avoid the Islamic Republic’s territorial waters.
About a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through the strait before the war began. Iran’s grip on it during the war led to a global energy crisis, though oil prices have sharply dropped since wartime highs of USD 120 a barrel. Missile alerts sounded across several Gulf Arab countries early Sunday morning.
Qatar’s military said it intercepted incoming Iranian fire, with explosions heard in the neighboring United Arab Emirates. Three people, including a child, were wounded as a result of falling shrapnel from the interception of Iranian attacks, Qatar’s Interior Ministry said, giving no further details on their conditions.
Meanwhile, missile alerts sounded in Bahrain, an island kingdom in the Persian Gulf home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet. Kuwait’s military also said it was intercepting incoming fire.
The Omani state news agency said drones struck sites in an area that sits on the Strait of Hormuz and issued a shelter-in-place warning for residents in the region.
The attack came after the two countries held talks on Saturday. Oman summoned the Iranian ambassador to protest the strikes.
Three Iranian missiles struck areas across Jordan, causing minor damage but no injuries, Jordan’s state news agency reported.
Sirens also sounded in the United Arab Emirates, but the Government said missiles did not cross into UAE borders. The UAE so far hasn’t been targeted in the most recent round of Iranian attacks.
In the Strait of Hormuz attack, a Cyprus-flagged container ship was hit by Iran and suffered “significant engineroom damage”, the US Central Command said early Sunday morning.
Oman’s maritime authority said it rescued 23 crew members from the ship, but that one is still missing. India’s Ministry of External Affairs said the missing crew member is an Indian national and said it was working with Oman to locate him.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre, overseen by the British military, said the ship had been hugging the shoreline of Oman. That’s been the way ships have entered and exited the Persian Gulf while avoiding Iranian territorial waters.
Iran has sought to maintain control over transit through the strait during the 60-day ceasefire. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said multiple vessels “disregarded our warnings” and ignored instructions to follow what it called an approved route. One of them “was struck by a warning shot and brought to a stop”.
Iran said that the strait would remain closed “until further notice” and said it would consider targeting “additional enemy bases in the region” if it faced more attacks.
Iranian state media reported US strikes across the country, including southern Iran in the province closest to the Strait of Hormuz, and military sites in a province near Tehran.
The latest violence followed Iran and Oman’s foreign ministers meeting on Saturday to discuss the strait. The narrow strait sits in both Iran and Oman’s territorial waters, but has long been considered an international waterway.
Oman said it and Iran agreed to continue discussing the Strait of Hormuz “at the technical and political levels.” However, Iran offered no statement about the strait being open to all - something sought by the Trump administration.
US President Donald Trump suggested last week that the interim deal in the Iran war was “over”.
But mediators, including Pakistan, Qatar and Egypt, have continued efforts to reach an agreement. A regional official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss those talks, said efforts to shore up the ceasefire were continuing Sunday.
Iran’s new supreme leader, still unseen since the war began, also vowed in his first statement since the funeral of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Iranians would avenge his killing in the war’s opening strikes on Feb 28.
Such revenge “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said in a statement carried on state television.
