U.S. Central Command said on Saturday evening that it had launched strikes on Iran after the Iranian navy attacked a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, rejecting a U.S. ultimatum to open the critical waterway to traffic.<\/p>\n
Hours earlier, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had met in Oman with its top diplomat to discuss safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz, but he made no public commitments. The prospect of a reopening seemed dimmer than ever after Iran announced the attack, a warning shot on a container ship, and said it would close the strait \u201cuntil the end of U.S. interference in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Iranian navy said it had fired after \u201cseveral ships attempted to travel along an unapproved route\u201d and ignored directions to transit through Iran\u2019s territorial waters. It warned that it would meet any U.S. retaliation to its attack with a \u201cforceful response.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s latest move came after a heavy week of skirmishes between the United States and Iran focused on the strait. Tehran\u2019s military has continued to claim its own waters<\/a> as the only viable route, and this week, U.S. officials said, Iran attacked three ships traveling through<\/a> the waterway. Iran did not claim responsibility for those attacks.<\/p>\n Those earlier strikes prompted a forceful American retaliation<\/a> and U.S. officials<\/a> to issue the ultimatum, saying that they expected Iran to publicly declare an end to attacks on commercial ships in the waterway and acknowledge that all channels for crossing it were open. If not, the officials said, \u201cwe\u2019re not going to have a good outcome for them.\u201d<\/p>\n Adding to the tensions, President Trump and Iran\u2019s supreme leader had continued to trade threats. In a rare written message on Saturday, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed revenge for the killing of his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling it the \u201cdemand of our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n It was his first statement since a weeklong funeral for the elder Ayatollah Khamenei<\/a>, culminating in his burial in Mashhad on Thursday. Although many Iranians loathed his repressive 37-year rule, millions joined processions across Iran and Iraq, which the Islamic republic used to project unity and defiance toward its enemies.<\/p>\n The ayatollah\u2019s words deepened the doubt hanging over the fragile truce. While the Trump administration had said the cease-fire would fully lift Iran\u2019s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which began after the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February \u2014 that has yet to happen.<\/p>\n Instead, Iranian forces have fired on ships traveling on routes they deem unacceptable, seeking to maintain control of the strait, and prompting the U.S. military to retaliate with attacks on Iranian military sites. The United States also revoked<\/a> a sanctions waiver that had temporarily permitted the sale of Iranian oil.<\/p>\n So far, threats by President Trump and bombardment by American warplanes have not succeeded in forcing Iran to relax its grip on the strait. Instead, both countries are now engaged in a simmering standoff \u2014 neither all-out war nor peace \u2014 with Mr. Trump saying on Friday that June\u2019s cease-fire agreement was \u201cover.\u201d<\/p>\n Later, Mr. Trump added a threat on social media, vowing that \u201c1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran\u201d should the country make good on its threats to assassinate him or try to do so. U.S. law enforcement says Iran has devised several plots to kill him<\/a>, as well as other American government officials, over the years.<\/p>\n In a seeming retort, Iran\u2019s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, said that the country would seek revenge for his father. \u201cWe pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred,\u201d he wrote in a message published on Saturday.<\/p>\n The new supreme leader was absent from his father\u2019s funeral and has been neither seen nor heard in public since succeeding him in early March. He is believed to have been wounded on the first day of the war, according<\/a> to Iranian and Israeli officials.<\/p>\n The latest round of fighting began this week after Iran fired on three ships traversing the strait, U.S. officials said, with some of those vessels linked to the Persian Gulf countries of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both U.S. allies.<\/p>\n U.S. forces retaliated with two days of heavy bombardment, attacking about 170 Iranian military targets, according to the U.S. military. On Friday, an Iranian health ministry spokesman said on social media that at least 17 people<\/a> were killed in the attacks. Iran\u2019s state television identified at least eight of the dead as soldiers.<\/p>\n Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Kuwait, Bahrain and, for the first time since the beginning of the truce, Jordan.<\/p>\n The battle of wills in the Persian Gulf has reinforced skepticism that Mr. Trump can reach a broader pact with Iran to rein in its nuclear program, a core aim of the U.S.-Israeli war. Under the June cease-fire agreement, the two countries were supposed to negotiate a more comprehensive agreement in 60 days \u2014 a time frame that appears increasingly remote.<\/p>\n Oman has circulated its own proposal<\/a> for jointly administering the Strait of Hormuz alongside Iran, including the potential imposition of service fees on transiting ships. The plans would be a significant change from the prewar status<\/a> in the strait, when boats generally passed freely.<\/p>\n Leily Nikounazar and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. Central Command said on Saturday evening that it had launched strikes on Iran after the Iranian navy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[76302,76301,128,1452,14670,9,24,63,5007,9670,160,35553,62208,129,131,130,1069,1554],"class_list":["post-293570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-abbas","tag-araghchi","tag-bronx","tag-donald-j","tag-iran","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-oil-petroleum-and-gasoline","tag-oman","tag-peace-process","tag-ships-and-shipping","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-trump","tag-united-states-international-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}