Iranian forces open fire on vessels at Strait of Hormuz
• Attack follows joint missile strike by US, Israel Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has said it forced at least two vessels back westward out of the Strait of
• Attack follows joint missile strike by US, Israel
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has said it forced at least two vessels back westward out of the Strait of Hormuz, with firing involved on Saturday.
In the early hours of February 28, Iran launched reprisal attacks on the United States (US) military bases in the Middle East, with multiple explosions reported in Abu Dhabi, Manama, Doha, and Kuwait, as well as in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The attack followed a joint missile strike by the US and Israel on Iran.
Now in its sixth week, the conflict has since disrupted economic activities in the region, with the rest of the world feeling the heat.
On Saturday, Iran said it had tightened control of the narrow waterway.
Some vessels reported they received radio messages from the IRGC navy telling them the strait was closed again and no ships were allowed to pass through.
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UK Maritime Trade Operations, based in Dubai and run by the UK Royal Navy, said that two Iranian gunboats opened fire on a tanker and a vessel north-east of Oman.
According to TankerTrackers, Iran's navy had forced two Indian vessels back out of the Strait of Hormuz, with firing involved.
One of the vessels is an Indian-flagged VLCC supertanker carrying two million barrels of Iraqi oil. The impact was not immediately clear.
Iran said on Saturday it was reimposing strict military controls on the strait, the conduit of about a fifth of global oil trade before the war, leading to uncertaintyover whether such traffic would be allowed to continue through the strait.
US President Donald Trump hours earlier had cited “some pretty good news” about Iran, declining to elaborate.
But he also said fighting might resume without a peace deal by Wednesday, when a two-week ceasefire expires.
Iran had announced its temporary reopening of the strait following a separate US-brokered 10-day ceasefire agreement on Thursday between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon.
But on Saturday, Iran's central military command announced it would resume “strict management” of the Strait of Hormuz.
In a statement on state television, it said Washington had broken a promise by continuing its naval blockade of ships sailing to and from Iranian ports.
And in a message posted on his Telegram channel, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said Iran's navy was ready to inflict “new bitter defeats” on its enemies.
