Escalating US-Iran strikes increase threat to interim peace agreement

Trump said a moment might come when he abandoned talks and the US would “militarily finish the job”.

- 

The US president posted on social media: “If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

Kuwait, which hosts a major US army base, said it had intercepted two ballistic missiles and that there were no reports of injuries or damage. Bahrain’s interior ministry said the strikes had damaged a residential building near the international airport and that no one had been killed.

Qatar’s interior ministry said one Qatari national was killed and a second person injured by shrapnel from “military operations in the area”. The two were on a boat that went missing on Saturday and was located early yesterday. The ministry did not give the location of the incident and did not say whether the shrapnel was linked to the Iranian drone attacks.

The latest violence has been triggered by efforts to reopen the strait of Hormuz to all shipping without Iran’s direct oversight. The strategically critical waterway, which carried a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid gas supplies before the war, has long been considered an international passageway.

US Central Command said in a statement that its strikes were “in direct response to continued Iranian aggression against commercial shipping” and targeted Iranian military surveillance, communications, air defence, drone storage and mine-laying facilities.