Oil prices again spiked this week after a few weeks of relative stability following the renewed fighting as Iran continues to maintain a stranglehold over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, responsible for roughly 20% of global oil shipping.
Iran said it hit US military bases in Kuwait and the UAE on Thursday, vowing to avenge a wedding attack it accused Washington of carrying out as US Vice President JD Vance said the strike was being investigated.
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The new clashes, which began with US raids on Sunday, have deepened the impasse in the six-month war, as Iran maintains a stranglehold on the strategic Strait of Hormuz and Washington presses its counter-blockade of Iranian ports.
Kuwait's army said on Thursday it intercepted a missile and drone attack from Tehran, with the Iranian army reporting that it hit US assets at the Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base "with missiles and drones". Kuwait called the strikes a "grave breach of the rules of international law".
Iran's army also said it struck Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, but the Gulf country reported no such attack.
The strikes came after the Iranian Red Crescent said a missile attack on a wedding in the coastal town of Kuhestak killed at least four people on Tuesday night, including a child, and wounded more than 50 other people attending the celebrations.
Vance said Washington was probing the alleged strike but cast doubt on reports out of Iran.
"I know that we're investigating," he told a White House briefing. "I will say that the Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what's happened in the conflict thus far. So I'm extremely sceptical of this."
Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) chief Ahmad Vahidi vowed on Thursday to avenge the victims of the attack, saying "the pure blood of these oppressed martyrs will not go unanswered.”
US Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Tim Hawkins said "the US military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” The incident is similar to a previous attack in the early days of the war where more than 120 school children were killed in an attack on a girls’ school, initially denied by the US, but later confirmed after investigations.
Extensive US bombardment of sites across Iran killed at least 19 people over the past week after President Donald Trump said his military was prepared to attack Iran at "any time”.
An Iranian state-run news agency added on Thursday that six members of the Iranian army's naval forces were killed by US attacks this week, but it was not immediately clear if the six were among the 19 dead.
Tehran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East this week, saying it targeted US bases and forces in Washington-allied Gulf Arab countries, including the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and also Jordan and Iraq's Kurdistan region.
Vance said however that he "wouldn't call it a war," claiming that "right now, there is no active shooting,” instead describing occasional bouts of exchanges as “flare-ups” but maintaining that the active firing phase only lasted roughly six weeks.
The war erupted on February 28 with US-Israeli attacks on Iran that killed its former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo of the war.
A fragile ceasefire collapsed in July after attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz resumed, through which one-fifth of world oil supplies previously flowed.