U.S. hits Iran for ninth consecutive night as casualties mount

The U.S. military on Sunday continued its campaign aimed at destroying Tehran’s ability to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

“CENTCOM began conducting a new wave of strikes against Iran at 7 p.m. ET today for the ninth consecutive night,” U.S. Central Command said in a post on X, adding the strikes would continue degrading Iranian military capabilities used to attack vessels transiting the strait.

The warring powers have intensified their attacks in the region, stoking fears of a return to full war, with Washington and Tehran accusing each other of violating a memorandum of understanding reached in June.

The waterway, which handled around 20% of the world’s oil traffic before the war, has become the central battleground of the war that began on Feb. 28, when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Oil rose on the escalation, with Brent crude futures climbing almost 3% to about $90.7 a barrel, while U.S. WTI futures rose 2.5% to $84.6.

The human toll continued to climb over the weekend. U.S. forces said Sunday that a third American service member was killed in recent fighting with Iran, and that it had located unidentified remains in Jordan after a service member was listed as missing in action, bringing the number of U.S. personnel killed in the nearly five-month war to 17.

Iranian authorities said Sunday that at least 50 people were killed and more than 500 wounded in the renewed U.S. strikes this month.

“The memorandum said little about how disputed incidents would be investigated or how a breach in one area would affect obligations elsewhere,” said Michael Feller, chief strategist at Geopolitical Strategy. The memorandum’s ambiguity meant the incident quickly became a dispute over whether the agreement still existed, he noted.

U.S. strikes have widened in recent days to target civilian infrastructure, including the Bonji desalination plant that cut off water supplies to about 10,000 people.

Tehran has also retaliated across the Gulf with fresh attacks on targets in neighboring countries, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Kuwaiti officials said last Friday that Iranian missile and drone strikes targeted civilian infrastructure in the country, including a water desalination plant.

The U.S. embassy in Bahrain’s capital Manama said Monday that it has information suggesting that Iran may seek to target unspecified locations in the city, urging all Americans there to remain vigilant.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Monday that two oil tankers “exploded” attempting to travel through the “unsafe and dangerous route south of the Strait of Hormuz.” The Iranian authority has warned vessels against using the U.S. and Oman-backed southern corridor, insisting that only Iranian-designated routes are permitted.

Hormuz traffic has slowed to the lowest level in three weeks amid renewed hostilities, according to maritime intelligence firm Kpler, with only eight passings on Thursday compared to 15 a day earlier.

U.S. officials, however, insisted that flows were still holding up. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that about two-thirds of pre-conflict traffic — roughly 14 million barrels a day — is moving through the chokepoint. Around 20 million barrels of crude oil and refined products passed through the waterway before the conflict.

In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Wright said that public reports indicating that most shipping traffic has stopped in recent days are just not true, estimating it was at about two-third of normal flow.