Pentagon chief claims Iran's new leader wounded, downplays Strait of Hormuz crisis

The Pentagon's top official walked into a Friday briefing room with a claim that cut against the grain of his own intelligence agencies: Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is wounded and possibly disfigured. Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary under Donald Trump, built his case on absence of evidence. A statement released by Iranian leadership the day before had arrived in written form only—no video, no audio recording. "Iran has plenty of cameras and voice recorders," Hegseth said. "Why a written statement? I think they know why." He went further, describing the new Iranian leader as scared, fleeing, and lacking the legitimacy his father once held. The language was sharp and personal: the Iranian leadership, he said, was hiding "like rats."

This was Hegseth's fifth Pentagon briefing since the war began in coordination with Israel. He spoke alongside General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and maintained the triumphalist tone that has defined these appearances. The former Fox News host criticized mainstream press coverage for what he saw as a failure to report American military achievements. The numbers he and Caine presented were stark: fifteen thousand Iranian targets struck. Missile launches from Tehran had dropped ninety percent since the fighting started. Drone attacks had fallen ninety-five percent by Thursday. Both men promised that Friday would bring the "most intense" day of American strikes yet.

But the briefing revealed a deeper tension when the conversation turned to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had effectively closed this critical waterway—the passage through which much of the world's crude oil moves. The closure was sending shockwaves through global markets and commerce, yet Hegseth insisted there was nothing to worry about. "We're dealing with it and there's no need to be concerned about this," he said. He accused the press of "reckless reporting" about Iranian mines in the strait, then stated flatly: "We don't have clear evidence of that." The problem was immediate and obvious. Other branches of American intelligence believed Iran had indeed seeded the passage with explosives. Hegseth's denial contradicted his own government's assessment.

When pressed on American planning for the strait, Hegseth described it as part of a "sequential strategy." He said the Pentagon had been monitoring the waterway from the beginning and had chosen destroying Iran's navy as one of the first targets for exactly this reason. "We have a plan for every option here," he declared. "It's not a strait we're going to allow to remain in dispute." He offered no explanation of how those plans would work or what they actually entailed.

The briefing also addressed the bombing of a girls' school in Minab on the first day of the conflict. At least one hundred seventy-five people died, most of them children. A preliminary military investigation, reported by The New York Times, attributed the strike to the United States. The error, according to military sources, stemmed from outdated intelligence. The facility had once been part of a military complex but had been separated and converted to civilian use in 2016—a fact the targeting information did not reflect. President Trump had claimed Iran attacked the school with a Tomahawk missile, a weapon Iran does not possess and that the United States manufactures and sells only to four allies. Hegseth announced he had appointed an officer from outside Central Command to lead the investigation. "The investigation will take whatever time is necessary to address all the issues surrounding this incident," he said, offering no timeline and no commitment to transparency about what had happened or why.