Iran is trying to inflict enough global economic pain to pressure the United States and Israel to halt their bombardment, which started the war on Feb. 28. Iran's president said its attacks would continue until Iran gets security guarantees against another assault, indicating that even a ceasefire or U.S. declaration of victory might not halt the conflict.
U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking at a Wednesday event in Kentucky, promised to “finish the job,” even though he claimed Iran is “virtually destroyed.”
Iran hit a container ship off the coast of Dubai, caused a blaze near Bahrain's international airport, targeted a major Saudi oil field with a drone and forced Iraq to halt operations at all of its oil terminals after attacking its port of Basra on the Persian Gulf.
Also Wednesday, Trump did an interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC-TV CBS and said he planned to tap the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in an effort to bring down gasoline prices.
“Right now, we’ll reduce it a little bit, and that brings the prices down,” Trump said, without providing details.
That interview followed the president acknowledging that stock markets had been volatile as gas prices have risen, saying, “I figured we’d be hit a little bit. But, we were hit probably less than I thought.”
“We’ll be back on track in a pretty short while,” Trump said. “Prices are coming down very substantially. Oil will be coming down.”
Meanwhile, sirens wailed after midnight in Jerusalem as Israel intercepted incoming Iranian missiles, and loud booms were heard later in the day in another attack on the city, while Iran-backed Hezbollah militants launched some 200 rockets from Lebanon at the country's north.
Israel responded with what the military described as a “wide-scale wave of strikes” on Tehran and in Lebanon, where 11 people were killed in two early morning strikes.
The U.N. refugee agency meanwhile sais up to 3.2 million people in Iran have been displaced by the ongoing war. It said most have fled from Tehran and other major cities toward the north of the country or rural areas.
Iranian officials dismiss any notion of backing down
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei hasn't yet made a statement or been seen since being chosen to succeed his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening day of the conflict.
But Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian suggested online Thursday that for the war to end, the world would need to recognize Iran’s “legitimate rights,” pay reparations and offer guarantees against future attacks.
In addition to attacking energy infrastructure around the region, Iran has a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway leading from the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean through which a fifth of the world's oil is transported.
Amid speculation that the U.S. might target Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s main oil terminal, Iran's parliamentary speaker threatened that any attempt to take Iranian islands would “make the Persian Gulf run with the blood of invaders.”
“The blood of American soldiers is Trump’s personal responsibility,” Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf added in a social media post.
With traffic in the strait effectively stopped, the price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose another 9% to more than $100 a barrel, up some 38% over what it cost when the war started. Prices have swung back and forth in recent days, at one point surging to around $120 a barrel.
