US Strikes Iran Again as the Battle Over Hormuz Rages
American forces struck Iran again early on Monday, the fourth wave in a week, hitting air defences, coastal radars and missile sites in what US Central Command again called an effort to stop Iran threatening shipping. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had hit US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain in reply. At the centre of it all is a factual standoff over the Strait of Hormuz: Iran says it has closed the waterway, while President Trump insists it is “open” to commercial traffic. The truth is being tested tanker by tanker.
The dispute over whether Hormuz is open or closed is the war in miniature, because the answer determines everything that follows: a genuine closure chokes a fifth of the world’s oil and forces a wider American intervention, while an open strait exposes Iran’s central threat as bluff. Both sides therefore assert their version as fact. What is not in doubt is the tempo — four rounds of US strikes in a week, more than 300 targets, and Iranian reprisals reaching the American bases dotted across the Gulf. The one channel still open is in Oman, where mediators are floating a plan to split the strait into two managed corridors. Britain’s forces sit inside the target map, at the Bahrain naval base and the Qatar air hub. Watch the tanker-tracking data as the real arbiter of who is right, the oil price, and whether the Oman plan can turn a shooting war back into a negotiation.