Iran threatened a "crushing response" to the July 7 US strikes, and on Wednesday it fired. [1] The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had targeted 85 US military installations across Bahrain and Kuwait with missiles and drones. [2] The physical record is smaller. Kuwait's military said its air defenses intercepted 15 projectiles — two ballistic missiles and 13 drones — over the capital at dawn, reporting no casualties, though shrapnel from the interceptions knocked out some power lines. [3] One Indian citizen was killed by a drone in Kuwait. [2] Bahrain sounded its air-raid sirens a third time Wednesday morning. [1]

The gap is the whole story. Iran claims 85 installations struck; the operating record shows 15 projectiles intercepted, no confirmed base destruction, and casualties limited in the July 8 window to the single death in Kuwait. On X, pro-Iran and some anti-war accounts have inflated Tehran's own count into a picture of American humiliation on Gulf soil. The paper measures the claim against the record — the same discipline it runs on the strait, where a strait declared reopened still carries 41 percent of its traffic.

On July 7 the paper framed the tanker attacks and the revoked oil waiver as one instrument, with Iran threatening a decisive response. Wednesday the response landed. A number announced by a launching force is not a target destroyed. Fifteen were intercepted over Kuwait; that is the count that has a source.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem