United States Strikes Targets Across Iran as Ceasefire Collapses and Hormuz Blockade Prepares to Resume

The mid-June understanding that extended the United States-Iran ceasefire and began reopening the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed. United States Central Command (CENTCOM) said its forces struck dozens of military targets across Iran, including air-defense systems, coastal radar sites, missile and drone facilities and small boats, using fighter aircraft, naval vessels, one-way attack aerial drones and, for the first time in combat, one-way attack sea drones. CENTCOM also said its naval blockade of Iranian ports would resume, a reversal of the framework that only days earlier had pointed toward an end to the fighting and a restoration of commercial transit.

CENTCOM said the blockade would cover Iran's ports and terminals along its southern coastline, while allowing vessels bound for other destinations to pass and permitting humanitarian shipments after inspection. The command said the strikes hit sites near Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, Jask, Konarak, Chah Bahar and Abu Musa. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it responded by striking United States-linked sites in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, including a surface-to-surface missile base in Kuwait that it said it destroyed. The number of targets each side hit is contested, and each government disputes the other's account of the damage.

Oil prices moved sharply on the renewed fighting. Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, rose about 9.6% to settle at $83.30 a barrel, its highest settlement since June 12, as traders weighed the risk of prolonged disruption to a waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes.

The exchanges follow days of escalation that the parties will now contest. The United Arab Emirates Defense Ministry earlier confirmed that two of its tankers, the Mombasa and the Al Bahiyah, were struck by Iranian cruise missiles in Omani territorial waters, killing one Indian crew member and injuring eight others, The Hill reported. The IRGC had said in a statement carried by IRNA that it targeted an air base in Jordan with ballistic missiles. Casualty figures and the extent of damage on each side could not be independently confirmed.

Iran has warned that continued United States strikes would prompt it to widen the range of American installations it targets across the region. Israeli strikes in Lebanon, which Iran has said could void its compliance because Israel was not a party to the talks, remain a further source of instability. Whether the fighting expands, and whether shipping can move through the strait at all, is now the central question.