The American military had attacked about 90 military targets in Iran, including “air defense systems, coastal surveillance assets, missile and drone storage sites, naval capabilities and military logistics infrastructure along Iran’s coastline,” U.S. Central Command said shortly before midnight on Wednesday night.
“The latest strikes follow successful execution of offensive strikes in Iran the night before,” CENTCOM said. The strikes “further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping and innocent civilian mariners in the Strait of Hormuz,” it added.
Hours before the strikes began, U.S. President Donald Trump said that negotiating with Iranian regime leaders was “just a waste of time,” calling them “liars,” “scum” and “sick people.”
“If they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it,” Trump said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
Trump ordered the additional strikes to “further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz,” according to CENTCOM.
“The United States is holding Iran accountable for recent unjustified aggression against commercial shipping and civilian crews freely navigating a vital international waterway,” it added.
Trump shared video footage on Wednesday of loud booms, explosions and fire coming out of a building, including apparently at Iran’s Chabahar Port, and stated that “this is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran.”
“If it happens again, it will get much worse,” he said.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said early on Thursday that it had retaliated against U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, after air-raid sirens sounded in the two Gulf states.
The IRGC warned it would expand its response to other U.S. bases in the Gulf if the U.S. military continued its campaign.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Tehran’s lead negotiator, wrote in a post on X on Thursday morning that the Strait of Hormuz “will only open under Iranian arrangements, not American threats.”
Ghalibaf said the United States had yet to learn that “bullying and breaking its commitments no longer come without a cost.” He added, “Let me put it plainly: If you strike, you’ll get hit.”
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One at Royal Air Force Mildenhall in England on Wednesday that Iran’s representatives “called a little while ago” because “they want to make a deal so badly.”
“We have many ways we can win, but we’ve already won militarily. They have very little left and they want to make a deal so badly,” the president said. “I just don’t know if they’re worthy of making a deal. I don’t know that they’re going to honor the deal. That’s the problem.”
On Tuesday, the U.S. military said that it had hit more than 80 targets in Iran with “precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.”
“U.S. forces struck Iranian air defense systems, command and control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile capabilities and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait to degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking international commerce flowing through the international trade corridor,” CENTCOM said at the time.
Earlier on Wednesday, CENTCOM said that more than 20 U.S. naval warships were “patrolling waters across the Middle East, as CENTCOM forces continue promoting regional security and stability.”
