Dubai: 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 apparently responded with attacks targeting Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
The strait has become the key sticking point in any further negotiations between Iran and the United States to reach a permanent end to the war that began on Feb 28.
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.
The US military’s Central Command said it hit some 140 targets in the strikes, far more than the last two rounds, and went after missile and drone launch sites, ammunition dumps, communication equipment and other sites.
The attacks “degrade Iran’s ability to attack civilian mariners and commercial vessels freely transiting the strait,” it said.
The new crossfire in the Persian Gulf comes days after US President Donald Trump suggested an interim deal in the Iran war was “over”.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote online: “Iran made a poor choice. Now they pay.”
Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and a main negotiator, responded.
“The era of one-sided deals is OVER,” he wrote on X. “We told you: keep your word or pay the price. Reality is knocking.”
The US launched three rounds of airstrikes targeting Iran in the last week over Iranian attacks on ships heading through the Strait of Hormuz using a route seeking to avoid the Islamic Republic’s territorial waters.
Tehran 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.
Missile alerts sounded across several Gulf Arab nations.
Qatar’s military said in a statement it intercepted incoming Iranian fire, with explosions heard in neighbouring 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.
Meanwhile, missile alerts sounded for the third time Sunday 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.
Meanwhile, the Omani state news agency said drones struck sites in northeastern Oman. Iran had previously claimed attacks on Oman, which the sultanate did not acknowledge. The attack came after the two countries held talks on Saturday.
It wasn’t immediately clear what locations were under attack in the UAE, which so far hadn’t been targeted in the latest round of attacks by Iran.
The latest attack on the Emirates, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, came in May when a drone sparked a fire on the edge of the country’s sole nuclear power plant.
Iran also made a series of claims about attacks elsewhere that were not immediately confirmed.
In the Strait of Hormuz attack, a Cyprus-flagged container ship was hit by Iran and suffered “significant engineroom damage” and a civilian crew member is missing, US Central Command said early Sunday morning.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre, overseen by the British military, said the ship had been travelling on a route hugging the shoreline of Oman.
That’s been the way ships have entered and exited the Persian Gulf while avoiding Iranian territorial waters. The ship’s crew abandoned the vessel as it was ablaze, the centre said.
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said multiple vessels “disregarded our warnings and instructions to correct their course and proceed along the 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 swathes of the entire 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 Saturday to discuss the strait, after days of Iranian attacks on ships and US retaliation that dealt a blow to the interim deal to end the war.
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.
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 February 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.
US officials, speaking Friday on condition of anonymity about the current situation with Iran, said the resumption of strikes even before the latest round came as a result of what they described as a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners who were trying to sabotage the ceasefire.
Iran has insisted its theocracy is unified under the new supreme leader.
After the US wrapped up strikes Thursday, more attacks reportedly hit Iran, raising questions about who else may be targeting the Islamic Republic.
Israel didn’t claim them, meaning the Gulf Arab states may have launched them, likely as a means to deter Iran from attacking them again. Iran Thursday retaliated for US strikes by targeting Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.
The strikes in Iran over two rounds of strikes last week killed at least 17 people and wounded 115 others, Iranian Health Ministry spokesperson Hossein Kermanpour said.
