U.S. Central Command said American forces began striking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran at 12 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, twenty-four hours after President Donald Trump told Fox News the United States would "hit them hard." [1][4] CENTCOM did not identify the sites. Iranian state media reported explosions on Qeshm Island and in the port cities of Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Jask and Sirik. [4] Trump called the raids "large and powerful" on Truth Social and said that if Iran answered, "they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level." He added that it would "not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings." [1][2] In a call with Fox News he went further: "This is a very big hit today. If it goes a third time, they're going to be totally wiped out as a country." [3]
Monday's paper treated resumed fire as the empirical test of "Mission Accomplished," not a new war — Larak Island, missiles at two Jordan air bases, a tanker burning on mines, and a threat that still had not been carried out. Tuesday is that test's second session. It is not a fresh opening.
CENTCOM's own X feed is the operational record the wire copy keeps selling as a limited restart. The afternoon post said forces "began striking" IRGC targets after attempted attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and on American service members in the region. [1][4] A later post said the wave was complete and named air defense, radar, maritime, mine-laying and communications targets. USA Today and CNBC still framed a month-long pause broken by a discrete new round. [1][2] The command named the work. The outlets named the pause.
The Iranian Red Crescent said shrapnel from a U.S. missile attack hit a residential home in Kuhestak, in Sirik county of Hormozgan province, where a wedding was under way. Four people, including a young child, were killed and more than 50 were injured, the Red Crescent said. [3] The United States had not commented on the wedding by the time the Guardian wrapped its live file at 5:47 p.m. Eastern. [3] IRIB aired video of debris and rescuers. That is an announcement and a casualty count from the Iranian Red Crescent, not a completed forensic chain of munition, aimpoint and blast path. The paper's standing rule on kinetic claims still holds: radar, wreckage, impact inspection and independent review decide what happened. A wedding toll of four including a child is the Tuesday record. It is not a later roundup.
Iran answered in the language it has used since Sunday. State broadcaster IRIB said the IRGC had begun a "regretful response to the aggressors." [3] IRGC spokesperson Sardar Mohebi said on X that "severe punishment" awaited the United States and that Washington "will regret its new attacks." [3][4] Tasnim said the armed forces had launched a "decisive operation" against U.S. bases and interests in the region. [2] Fars cited the same regret line. [4] The words are the same as Monday's. The geography is not.
Jordan's army said it intercepted 10 of 13 Iranian ballistic missiles and that the other three fell in remote areas. [3] Sirens sounded in Mafraq and Aqaba, Jordanian state television reported. [3] The Associated Press, carried by CNBC, reported explosions over Aqaba without establishing what caused them. [2] The IRGC claimed it had killed "a large number of US forces" and destroyed "several installations and enemy attack helicopters" in a ballistic attack on Marine barracks at Camp Titin, a site near Aqaba. [3] Reuters and Al Jazeera, cited in the Guardian's wrap, reported U.S. sources saying there were no injuries and no damage at the barracks. [3] Announcement and forensic chain split in a single afternoon. The paper prints both. It does not split the difference.
The overnight record that Tuesday's strikes were sold as answering was already a named-hull story, not a mine story. Shipping intelligence firms Marisks and Kpler said two loaded very large crude carriers — the Saudi-flagged Sidr and the Liberian-flagged Senegal Prosperity — took unknown projectiles minutes apart on the Omani corridor late Monday, each having loaded about two million barrels at Juaymah. [4] Crews were reported safe. A companion piece in this edition carries the vessel record. The oil tape is a third file. Do not collapse them. Paper crude jumped on strike reports after Brent was already up 2 percent on the day. [4] Physical traffic through the strait remains the thinner fact.
Tehran's political line did not move with the explosions. President Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking at a regional summit in Kyrgyzstan, said Tehran would reciprocate immediately if Washington honored commitments under the June memorandum of understanding that was supposed to halt the fighting. [4] That memorandum declared an end to a war that has now killed thousands in Iran and Lebanon since U.S. and Israeli strikes began on February 28, then deferred the hard issues into a 60-day negotiation that passed without a further agreement. [4] Parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf was quoted saying that if the enemy wanted Iran not to export oil from the Persian Gulf, "no one will be able to export oil." [4] Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told a Tehran briefing that Washington was "addicted to making excessive demands and has mistaken negotiations for dictating terms." [4] Qatar's mediators still sell talks. Tuesday's fire is the readout.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, at a G20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, said Washington was likely to announce bank sanctions against Iran this week and next and was looking at airline-leasing companies and other firms that do business with the IRGC. "We have zero tolerance. We are going to economically asphyxiate this regime," he said. [4] The economic campaign and the noon air campaign are being run as if they were the same war. They are not the same instrument. One asphyxiates on a calendar. The other hits at 12 p.m. Eastern and then posts that the wave is complete.
The domestic arithmetic has not improved. Trump's approval sits at 33 percent. Approval of the Iran war sits at 36 percent, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday. [2] The escalation lands on a midterm calendar Trump once promised would not include a war he said would be over in four weeks. [2] The U.S. Embassy in Qatar told Americans in the region to exercise "heightened vigilance and be aware of potential flight cancellations, airspace closures, and travel disruptions." [4] PVM analyst John Evans said the tit-for-tat exchanges "bring validation to those who believe that even if not a 'forever war', this conflict will run and run." [4] Al Jazeera's Tuesday explainer, written off Monday's "hit them hard" line, asked whether Washington had settled on a periodic-strike posture Axios had already described as "no war, no peace." [5] A posture is not a strategy. A noon start time is a schedule.
Sunday's Larak raid remains the first fire in a month, as CNBC recapped: U.S. forces struck rocket launchers after CENTCOM said IRGC personnel were preparing to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the strait; Iran answered at Jordan; the UAE said it intercepted a drone. [2] Trump told reporters Monday the Jordan strikes did not signal a return to full-scale war. A senior Iranian source told Reuters they were a "limited and contained confrontation." [4] Tuesday's wipe-out line and CENTCOM's completed-wave post are not those sentences. Limited is the word Washington used on Monday. Named target classes are what it posted on Tuesday. The two cannot be sanded into one restart brief.
The restart also lands on a Pentagon that already had a munitions problem on the record. This paper's Monday account of the shortage warning sat beside seven-year contracts for THAAD and Patriot subcomponents and a public denial that stocks were thin. Tuesday's wipe-out language does not replenish interceptors. It spends them. The paper's Monday companion on Trump's AI-generated Kharg Island video remains the other half of the same presidency: a synthetic fire posted as if it were a strike, then a real strike posted as if it were limited. Neither post is a forensic chain.
What changed between Sunday's Larak raid and Tuesday's noon wave is not the war's legal basis. Congress has not taken a merits vote. What changed is the sentence the president is now willing to say out loud. "Hit them hard" was a response. "Totally wiped out as a country" is an aims statement. USA Today still sold a limited restart. [1] CENTCOM named air defense, radar, maritime, mine-laying and communications. The gap is the product. A reader who only saw the limited-restart frame missed the command's own target list and the Fox wipe-out line. A reader who only saw the wipe-out line missed that the United States had not, as of the Guardian wrap, accounted for a wedding in Sirik. [3] Both omissions are the story.
The June memorandum is still the document Tehran cites. The 12 p.m. Eastern start time is still the fact Washington posted. They cannot both be the governing instrument. Tuesday chose the start time.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem