Iran-US Truce Wobbles as Fresh Strikes Resume in Gulf

The ceasefire between Washington and Tehran was always fragile, but on Wednesday it cracked visibly. Hours after Donald Trump made a tense phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent Israeli strikes on Beirut's suburbs, American warplanes were hitting Iranian military installations on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Central Command said it had detected aggressive Iranian activity and struck to defend itself, claiming to have neutralized missiles and drones. Iran said an American attack had damaged one of its oil tankers near the strait and destroyed a communications tower south of Qeshm. The response came swiftly.

Iranian forces fired roughly thirty drones and missiles at two targets: Kuwait's international airport and the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The attack on Kuwait killed at least one person—an Indian national—and wounded dozens more. The damage to civilian infrastructure was substantial. The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime's elite military unit and now its de facto power center following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in an Israeli airstrike, declared the strikes a "lesson" for the Trump administration. Iranian media also reported that Revolutionary Guard Navy forces had fired missiles at a vessel called the Panaya, sailing under a Liberian flag.

Yet the shooting did not sever the thin lines of communication that have kept this conflict from spiraling into something larger. Within hours, Trump was posting on Truth Social to deny reports that Iran had stopped sending messages through Pakistani intermediaries. "Our conversations have been continuous," he wrote, listing the days they had occurred. The channels remained open even as both sides traded fire.

Trump himself seemed caught between two paths. In a podcast interview with the New York Post, he described himself at a crossroads: either reach an agreement or pursue what he called "another way"—a phrase he clarified would be "not a pleasant" large-scale military intervention that would "end everything" and put an end to "the conversations" and "the nonsense." But then he pivoted to something unexpected. He said he thought it "probable" he would meet personally with Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Jamenei, who took power after his father's death. "I'd like to meet him. I'd like to meet everybody," Trump said. "We'll probably meet at some point, depending on how things develop."

The Iranian strikes also deepened rifts with neighboring Arab states. Kuwait, which hosts American military bases and has long been caught between its security ties to Washington and its geography, expelled two Iranian diplomats hours after the airport attack. The regime in Tehran views such countries as complicit in American pressure, and the strikes were partly meant to raise the cost of that cooperation.

Analysts are divided on what the day's violence means. Ehsan Rahimi, a political analyst focused on Iran, told this publication that the attacks do not necessarily signal the end of the truce but rather expose its true nature: not a genuine peace but a tactical pause sustained by fear of an uncontrollable regional war. Iran is trying to demonstrate it can still shift the balance and raise the price of pressure, he said, though that very effort reveals a deeper weakness—the regime cannot afford a prolonged conflict. According to the logic of political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Rahimi added, the ceasefire survives as long as negotiating under tension costs less than escalating. "Today it is not dead," Rahimi concluded, "but it is far more fragile."

What happens next depends on whether both sides believe talking remains cheaper than fighting. The channels are open. Trump has suggested he might sit down with Jamenei. But the Strait of Hormuz remains a place where miscalculation could unravel everything.