A new wave of missile and drone strikes across the Gulf has pushed the two-week-old truce between Washington and Tehran to the brink of collapse, exposing how loosely worded ceasefire terms left one critical question unresolved: who gets to decide how ships move through the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf that once carried roughly a fifth of the world's oil and natural gas before the four-month war broke out, has effectively been split into two competing claims. A US-led multinational maritime body announced over the weekend that it would expand a shipping route running close to Oman's coast for both inbound and outbound traffic, a move designed to let stranded tankers move without Iranian oversight. Tehran has rejected that arrangement outright, insisting it alone must regulate the waterway and signaling it intends to begin charging fees for transit through what it considers its own corridor.
That argument over jurisdiction, left unsettled when the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding earlier this month, has now produced several days of direct confrontation. Iranian forces twice struck vessels attempting to use the Oman-side route, including a drone strike on the Singapore-flagged container ship Ever Lovely on Thursday and an attack on the Panama-flagged tanker Kiku, which was hauling crude for Qatar's state energy company, on Saturday. The International Maritime Organization had to suspend a UN-backed evacuation effort for ships still stranded in the Gulf after the Ever Lovely was hit.
The United States answered each Iranian strike with its own. US Central Command said its forces hit Iranian surveillance infrastructure, communications systems, air defense sites, drone storage facilities and minelaying capabilities, describing the action as a direct response to continued Iranian aggression against commercial shipping. American officials said warplanes struck roughly ten military targets inside Iran on Sunday alone, with explosions reported near Sirik in the country's south.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for the retaliation that followed: a joint missile and drone operation against the Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait, which hosts American forces, and the US Fifth Fleet's facility at Port Salman in Bahrain. The Guard said in a statement that the operation destroyed eight military installations and warned that any further American aggression, "regardless of its pretext or the scale of its objectives," would be met with a "crushing response." It added that violating the truce breached the first article of what it called the Islamabad understanding and would trigger a complete halt to all diplomatic tracks.
Kuwait's military said its air defenses intercepted two ballistic missiles and reported no injuries or damage. Bahrain's interior ministry said an Iranian drone damaged a residential building in Muharraq, near the country's international airport, though no one was killed. Bahrain's foreign ministry condemned the strike as part of what it called a deliberate and systematic pattern of aggression against the kingdom's sovereignty and the safety of its residents, rather than an isolated incident.
Condemnation spread quickly across the region. Kuwait's government described the assault as a repeated and heinous act of aggression. The United Arab Emirates called the strikes on the two countries a blatant violation of their sovereignty and a threat to regional stability. Qatar, which has served as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, urged all sides to spare the region the consequences of unjustified attacks, while Jordan labeled the strikes a dangerous escalation and a breach of international law and the UN Charter. Oman's foreign ministry called for restraint and a return to dialogue.
President Donald Trump escalated his own rhetoric in response, writing on social media that the United States might soon reach "a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable" and would be forced to "militarily finish the job" it had started earlier this year. "If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist," he wrote. Vice President JD Vance, Trump's chief negotiator on the conflict, said separately that Washington had honored the ceasefire and that Tehran was responsible for any return to war, adding that Iran could raise its objections to the memorandum's terms through diplomatic channels rather than violence.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking in Baghdad during a state visit on Sunday, argued that Washington's effort to open a separate shipping lane was itself the source of the crisis. "Any interference in this matter, any attempt to establish new or separate arrangements from those currently being carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will only lead to further complications, delay the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and increase the level of tension," he said, calling on all parties to avoid steps that would deepen the standoff. He also proposed a regional security framework involving Gulf states that would exclude outside powers altogether, saying any new arrangement should include "all countries in the region and without the presence or interference of any country from outside the region."
Analysts say the standoff over Hormuz is as much about regional leverage as it is about shipping logistics. Iran's ability to threaten traffic through the strait is widely viewed as Tehran's most significant remaining card in the broader negotiation, used both to pressure Washington and to assert dominance over smaller Gulf neighbors. Losing exclusive control of the route, in this reading, would strip Iran of its strongest bargaining chip just as talks over sanctions relief and the future of its nuclear program remain unresolved.
Those underlying disputes have stalled progress since negotiators from Qatar and Pakistan brought US and Iranian delegations together at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland earlier this month. The memorandum signed there gave both sides 60 days to settle the remaining details — the strait, sanctions, and Iran's nuclear activity — before finalizing a lasting agreement. Despite the harsh rhetoric from both capitals, officials on both sides have indicated they still want to avoid a full return to war, with Trump telling reporters last week that negotiations were going "very well" even as strikes continued.
Hundreds of vessels, including oil tankers, were left blockaded inside the Gulf when the strait effectively closed during the war. Some ships began chancing the passage in recent weeks as the truce held, a development that had pushed oil prices back down toward prewar levels and offered relief to economies worldwide. That cautious normalization is now in jeopardy as both sides trade fire over who gets to set the rules for the water beneath those ships.
The renewed fighting in the Gulf has been compounded by separate violence in Lebanon, where a fragile, US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is also fraying. The Israeli military said a soldier was killed Sunday in a clash with a Hezbollah fighter near Deir Seryan in southern Lebanon, and Lebanon's National News Agency reported separate Israeli strikes near Taybeh and in the Nabatiyeh area the same morning. Israel currently occupies roughly 600 square kilometers of southern Lebanese territory, which it says it needs as a security buffer, while Hezbollah's leader said over the weekend that the group would keep fighting until Israeli forces withdraw entirely.
Tehran has tied any lasting peace with Washington to a genuine end to the fighting in Lebanon, where Iran backs Hezbollah. Israel is not a party to the US-Iran memorandum and is not bound by its terms, even though it launched its own offensive into southern Lebanon earlier this year. Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Sunday that Tehran remains committed to securing a full Israeli withdrawal and proposed that a newly formed "conflict control unit," involving Iran, the United States and Lebanon, convene as soon as possible to address the recurring violations.