The night before Americans vote in the midterm elections, US forces struck Iran again. The target on Monday was Qeshm, the biggest island in the Gulf, which straddles the Hormuz shipping route and is home to a navy installation as well as missiles stored underground. American officials were careful with their vocabulary, describing the attack as “defensive” and stressing that it did not mark a return to large-scale combat. It was a Journal scoop that brought the raid to light.
Washington’s version is that Revolutionary Guards units fired an anti-aircraft missile from the island at a US plane flying above the waterway. A US fighter then destroyed the launcher, Axios reported, citing an official, while The Hill said radar equipment had been hit as well. Explosions on Qeshm were later reported by Iran’s official media.
Earlier in the day Tehran had claimed to have downed US drones, a claim one American official dismissed as false. Perhaps the more striking revelation came from ABC News: Monday’s raid was only the latest in a string of limited strikes in recent weeks that Washington had deliberately kept out of the headlines, precisely to avoid signalling that the war was back on.
Donald Trump played the episode down. Speaking to journalists, the president claimed victory in what he called a war with Iran and said there had barely been any combat for months. In a television interview he nevertheless floated a possible strike on Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply protected nuclear facility. Tehran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei replied that the next move was up to the Americans.
Qatari mediators, supported by Cairo, Riyadh, Islamabad and Ankara, are still trying to coax both sides back to negotiations, but nobody in the region is betting on calm. Doha and Abu Dhabi have held emergency exercises, and tankers in regional waters were hit by projectiles on both Sunday and Monday.
