By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: American warplanes fired a Hellfire missile into the engine room of an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, the sixth vessel disabled since Washington imposed a naval blockade on Iran in April, touching off a cascade of retaliatory strikes and counter-strikes that laid bare the fragility of a ceasefire that has never truly held.
The exchange — spanning missile salvos toward Kuwait and Bahrain, drone attacks on American forces, and US strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz — unfolded even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington and insisted, with notable confidence, that a diplomatic breakthrough might arrive any day now.
The gap between those two realities — guns firing in the Gulf while diplomats speak of progress — has come to define the three months since the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran in late February.
A Tanker, a Missile, and a Spiral
The immediate trigger was the Botswana-flagged M/T Lexie, an unladen tanker that US Central Command said had ignored repeated warnings over a 24-hour period as it sailed through international waters toward Iran’s Kharg Island, north of the strait near Kuwait. A US aircraft fired a Hellfire missile into the vessel’s engine room, disabling it. Centcom released footage it said showed the moment of impact.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps responded swiftly. The IRGC said it launched missiles and drones at the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and at “a regional country” — widely understood to mean Kuwait — declaring that “disrupting the security of the Strait of Hormuz will carry a heavy price for the aggressive US military.”
Centcom flatly denied the IRGC’s account of the damage. “FALSE,” the military command posted on X. “All Iranian attacks on American forces failed.”
By Centcom’s account, two Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait “fell short or broke apart en route.” Three missiles aimed at Bahrain were intercepted by American and Bahraini air defense forces. Kuwait’s military, confirming the attacks, warned the public not to approach any debris or unidentified objects. Sirens sounded in Bahrain.
Centcom said it later repelled a second wave of Iranian drones targeting US forces in Kuwait, and that three additional attack drones launched toward civilian ships in regional waters were shot down. No American personnel were reported injured.
The US military responded to the Iranian salvos with strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island, the rocky outcropping that sits astride the strait’s entrance — the same chokepoint that has effectively been sealed to maritime traffic since the war began.
Rubio on the Hill: Progress and Limits
Even as the exchanges unfolded in the Gulf, Rubio was making his first public congressional appearance since the administration launched what it had initially described as a short, weeks-long military campaign against Iran.
The secretary of state — who also holds the title of national security adviser — offered senators what amounted to the administration’s most detailed articulation yet of its negotiating framework. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz, he said, was not a bargaining chip but a precondition: Iran must announce it was no longer levying tolls on shipping, cooperate in removing the mines it had placed, and commit to not firing on vessels. “That’s the predicate that opens the door to phase two,” he said.
Phase two, in Rubio’s telling, would require Iran to commit to disposing of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and to negotiate what he called “severe and long-term limitations, and or cancellation of enrichment activity.”
He was unequivocal that sanctions relief would not be granted simply for reopening the waterway. “Any sanctions relief is condition-based,” he said. “It has to be in return for the reason why those sanctions were put in place in the first place, which is their nuclear program.”
But Rubio was also more optimistic than the battlefield situation would seem to warrant. Iran had agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear program, he told senators, “that just a month ago” it had flatly refused to discuss. He described that as an opening of real significance, while acknowledging it carried no guarantee of a deal.
He also offered an assessment of Iranian military capacity that, if accurate, would represent a dramatic shift in regional power. Iran’s navy, he said, “lies at the bottom of the ocean.” Its missile program had been “substantially degraded,” its launcher capacity reduced, its drone-building capability “eroded” — though he conceded the regime retained “a lot of drones,” because, as he put it, “these are easy to make.”
Those claims have been contested. The New York Times reported in May that Iran had retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, though analysts noted that the more consequential damage may be to Iran’s ability to replace what it has lost, with more than 85 percent of its ballistic missile, drone and naval defense industrial base reported damaged or destroyed.
Rubio also told senators that Mojtaba Khamenei — who succeeded his father Ali Khamenei after the supreme leader was killed in the opening US-Israeli strikes on February 28 and has not been seen in public since — was alive and increasingly engaged in the regime’s deliberations. “I think there are indications out there that he is increasingly engaging at some level,” Rubio said, without elaborating.
Talks Stalled — Or Not, Depending on Who Is Asked
Rubio’s optimism ran directly counter to reports emerging from Tehran on Tuesday. Iran’s semi-official Fars and Tasnim news agencies — both considered close to the Revolutionary Guard — reported that Tehran had stopped communicating with mediators about extending the ceasefire, with the last message being Iran’s “clear” demand that any deal must include a halt to Israeli operations in Lebanon.
A regional official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Iran had not communicated at all on Tuesday, after indicating that a ceasefire in Lebanon was a prerequisite for talks to continue.
President Trump dismissed the reports on social media. “The conversations between us have been going on continuously, including four days ago, three days ago, two days ago, one day ago and today,” he wrote. “Where they lead, one never knows, but as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.'”
The contradiction — Iranian media reporting a communications blackout, Trump insisting talks continue uninterrupted — left the state of negotiations genuinely unclear. Iran’s Mehr news agency cited a source saying Tehran had not yet responded to a proposed final text and was taking what it called a “stern approach” rooted in a history of American non-compliance and deep institutional mistrust.
Lebanon Complicates Everything
Threading through all of it was Lebanon, where the war between Israel and Hezbollah — nominally separate from the US-Iran conflict but increasingly impossible to disentangle — showed no sign of cooling.
On Monday, Trump said he had personally intervened to stop an imminent Israeli strike on Beirut, speaking by phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, he said, with Hezbollah representatives. “All shooting will stop,” Trump declared.
By Tuesday, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency had counted 30 Israeli strikes across the south. Near Sidon, rescuers pulled the bodies of six members of the same family from the rubble — two children and a woman among them. The Israeli military issued fresh evacuation warnings for Nabatiyeh, accusing Hezbollah of ceasefire violations.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was blunt about what Beirut meant for Tehran’s calculus. “The ceasefire between Iran and the US is unequivocally a ceasefire on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” he said. “Its violation on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts. The US and Israel are responsible for the consequences of any violation.”
Washington and Jerusalem maintain the two theaters are distinct. The fighting in Lebanon, they insist, has no bearing on US-Iran talks. Tehran sees that position as untenable — and is using it as leverage.
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