Iran threatens to halt all Middle East energy exports amid renewed US blockade
Tehran shuts strait of Hormuz and carries out retaliatory strikes as Trump threatens to hit civilian infrastructure
Iran has threatened to halt all energy exports from the Middle East after the US reimposed a blockade of its ports and ships, as the two countries traded strikes for a fifth day and Donald Trump threatened to expand US strikes on Iran next week.
The US blockade came into force early on Wednesday, prompting Iran to shut the strait of Hormuz and carry out a wave of retaliatory airstrikes on countries hosting US bases in the region.
“Regional energy exports are either shared by all or denied to all,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement on Wednesday. It added that the strait would remain closed until the “end of America’s evils”, further disrupting shipping in the waterway that before the war was a chokepoint for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said the renewed US blockade had “in a way, dismantled the Islamabad memorandum”, the interim deal that, among other things, was meant to keep the strait open and give space for negotiations towards a permanent peace.
The flare-up in violence and disruption to shipping further drove up the price of oil, with the price of crude on Wednesday continuing to rise past the one-month high reached on Tuesday.
The US said Iran had attacked seven commercial ships in the strait last week, with almost a dozen crew members killed, missing or injured. Iran also launched airstrikes on Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait, countries that host US forces.
Jordan said it intercepted three ballistic missiles from Iran on Wednesday, while Kuwait said it was working to extinguish a fire caused by Iranian attacks.
At least 30 civilians have been killed by US strikes in southern Iran in recent days, said the Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani. At least seven Iranian soldiers were killed in US strikes on the Bampur military base in the south-east of the country, while a spokesperson for the Iranian ministry of health said 260 people had been injured by overnight strikes.
The US military said it completed a 90-minute wave of strikes on Iran on Wednesday afternoon. It said it targeted Iranian defence and missile sites on the Greater Tunb island in the strait of Hormuz, as well as the barracks for Iran’s mechanised brigade in Sistan and Balochistan province, Iranian state TV reported.
Iran’s army vowed a “decisive response to this aggressive action by the American enemy”.
The dispute over the strait threatened to pull the region back into a total war. Trump said he would begin targeting power plants and bridges in Iran if a deal was not reached by next week. Targeting civilian infrastructure without a clear military target could constitute a war crime.
“Next week it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” the US president said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
Axios, citing three sources, reported that Trump held a situation room meeting on Tuesday to discuss a massive offensive against Iran beyond the current strikes in order to force Tehran to reopen the strait.
Trump said US negotiators had been in touch with their Iranian counterparts to tell them to make a deal, while saying the US would save energy targets for last but would ultimately hit them.
Trump made similar comments in March, when he threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power stations and fresh water plants if Tehran did not agree to peace terms “shortly”.
In response, the IRGC said it had targeted what it described as command-and-control, logistics, fuel and military equipment facilities belonging to the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
The Iranian state news agency IRNA said earlier that Iranian forces had launched a drone attack on a military base in Jordan that hosts American warplanes.
Trump backtracked from a threat earlier this week that ships would have to pay a 20% fee to the US for “security” in the strait, replacing it with what he described as investment and trade deals with Gulf Arab states.
The US president said he had decided to scrap the toll “based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership”, and touted “massive” investments, just five hours before the toll was due to come into effect.
With Agence France-Presse