The United States military has carried out fresh overnight strikes inside Iran, targeting what officials described as a military site posing a threat to American forces and commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Ada Derana and the Daily Mirror reported, citing Reuters.
A US official said the military had also intercepted and shot down multiple Iranian drones judged to pose a similar threat. The strikes, not previously reported, came while Washington and Tehran were in talks aimed at ending a war that began on February 28 with US and Israeli attacks on Iran and that has driven global energy prices sharply higher.
US crude futures climbed more than $1 in early Thursday trade after the strikes, with West Texas Intermediate rising $1.42, or 1.6 percent, to $90.10 a barrel by 23:28 GMT, after settling 5.55 percent lower in the previous session.
Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump dismissed an Iranian state media report suggesting Iran and Oman would jointly manage shipping through the strait as part of a peace deal. “We will watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it — that’s part of the negotiation that we have,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting, insisting that the waterway would remain open and that no single country could control it. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy said only 23 ships, including tankers and container vessels, had passed through Hormuz with its permission in the previous 24 hours — a fraction of the 125 to 140 daily transits before the conflict.
The latest action follows the defensive strikes US Central Command carried out near Bandar Abbas on Monday, which destroyed two boats Iran had been attempting to use to lay mines and a missile site. Tehran condemned those strikes as a violation of the fragile April ceasefire. The Hormuz disruption matters acutely for Sri Lanka, whose fuel cargoes transit the waterway, even as global crude has hovered well above pre-war levels.
Trump separately threatened earlier in the week to “blow up” Oman if it sought to control the strait, and the White House dismissed an Iranian TV report claiming the draft deal would involve a US troop withdrawal from the region as a “complete fabrication.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated at the Cabinet meeting that “Iran’s never going to have a nuclear weapon.”
