US and Iran trade strikes around Hormuz after a month of quiet

The United States opened a new wave of strikes against Iran at noon Eastern time on 1 September. U.S. Central Command said the targets belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: air-defence sites, radar systems, maritime assets, mine-laying gear and communications nodes. President Donald Trump called the operation large and powerful. He said it answered a failed Iranian attempt to seed the Strait of Hormuz with sea mines and eight missiles fired at a U.S. base in Jordan, all of which he said were knocked down.

Hours later the IRGC said it had launched ballistic missiles at a Marine barracks on the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan and at American equipment stores in Iraq. Iranian outlets claimed a large number of U.S. personnel had been killed. U.S. officials said there were no American casualties. Jordan reported that air defences intercepted 10 of 13 incoming missiles and that the rest fell in unpopulated areas. Kuwait activated its own air defences against hostile drones.

The fighting ends a month in which both sides mostly held their fire. A temporary arrangement signed in June did not hold. The war reached its six-month mark on 28 August. Trump had tried, after the summer pause, to squeeze Iran through sanctions and a blockade of its ports rather than through daily bombing. That pivot lasted until the last days of August.

On 30 August U.S. forces hit two rocket launchers on Larak Island, the first known American attack on Iranian soil since 30 July. Iran answered on 31 August with ballistic missiles against two bases in Jordan. On Monday, shipping intelligence firms said two tankers leaving the strait were struck. On Tuesday the larger American barrage followed.

Iranian state media listed explosions in Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Konarak, Jask, Sirik, Minab, Asaluyeh and on Qeshm Island. Witnesses in Bandar Abbas told the Associated Press the blasts were stronger than those on Sunday and that smoke rose from the eastern side of the city. Two Iranian officials, speaking without names, said the perimeter of the commercial airport on Qeshm was among the sites hit. IRNA reported a strike near the civilian airport at Jiroft in the southeast and another near Ahvaz.

The Iranian Red Crescent said five people were killed and about 50 wounded when a projectile hit a wedding near Sirik, a coastal stretch on the strait. Mehr named a four-year-old child among the dead. A provincial official quoted by IRNA put the wounded at 68. Iranian media also reported a strike on a home in the town of Kuhestak. CENTCOM's public list of targets did not mention a wedding. The gap between those two accounts will sit in the record until investigators on the ground can be heard.

CENTCOM posted that the strikes had begun at 12:00 p.m. Eastern and that they were complete by 6:33 p.m. The window matters. It tells planners how long the United States was willing to keep aircraft and missiles in the air over a strait that still carries, even under threat, about 8 million barrels of oil a day, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Before the war the figure was closer to 20 million. Iran has largely halted ordinary vessel traffic through the waterway. Washington has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports.

Trump wrote that if Iran answered the Tuesday strikes it would be hit again at a much harder and higher level, and that a still larger attack was waiting in the wings. An IRGC spokesperson said America would regret the new attacks. Late on Tuesday Trump added that he did not care whether Tehran signed another agreement. He said the United States now had almost total control of the strait and that Iran's economy was collapsing.

Oil markets treated the day as a supply shock rather than a rumour. Brent rose more than $4 a barrel and settled at a five-week high near $96. Indian equities opened 2 September with the Sensex down more than 700 points and the rupee near 94.92 per dollar. Eurozone energy prices, already up 14.3 percent in the year to August, will feed the European Central Bank's meeting on 10 September.

The military logic on the American side, as described by one official to Axios, is to mow the lawn: keep hitting the radars and missiles Iran needs to threaten tankers, Navy ships and Air Force aircraft. That is a campaign of attrition, not a single knockout. It leaves open the question Trump himself posed in public. He asked when Iranians would rise up. Uprisings are not scheduled by press release. What can be measured is the tanker count, the price of Brent, and whether Jordanian and Iraqi bases stay quiet after dark.

Six months in, neither capital has a settlement it will sign. The June text is dead. The Hormuz channel is narrower in practice than it is on a chart. The next 72 hours will show whether Tuesday was another spike in an intermittent war or the start of a denser cycle of raids and replies.