The U.S. launched strikes on “multiple targets in Iran” late Wednesday afternoon Eastern time, U.S. Central Command said in a statement, without providing further details. Explosions could be heard in several southern Iranian cities, according to semiofficial Iranian news outlets.
President Donald Trump had said Iran would have to “pay the price” after it responded to earlier U.S. strikes with a wave of attacks targeting U.S. assets across the Middle East overnight, adding to a fresh cycle of violence that threatens to upend the increasingly shaky ceasefire between the two countries.
Trump on Wednesday morning appeared to threaten further military action against Iran in a post on social media. “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!” he wrote.
“We’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, ahead of the renewed strikes.
Earlier Wednesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned Tuesday’s U.S. strikes and said Iran had “severely hit U.S. bases and assets in the region that were the source of these aggressions.”
Persian Gulf states have a “legal and moral responsibility” to prevent their territory from being used by the United States and Israel for further attacks, the ministry said in a statement, adding that Iran would “not hesitate to exercise its inherent right to defend itself.”
Iran’s strikes targeted 21 sites at U.S. bases across the region, the semiofficial Iranian media outlet Tasnim reported, including those operated by the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, Ali al-Salem base in Kuwait and a U.S. air base in Jordan.
U.S. Central Command did not immediately confirm those attacks, but Kuwait’s military reported intercepting aerial attacks, and Jordan’s armed forces said they had intercepted five missiles from Iran. Bahrain’s military also said it had intercepted an unspecified number of Iranian missiles and drones. No deaths were reported.
Kuwait’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the continued Iranian attacks constitute “a dangerous overreach that endangers the lives of civilians and the safety of vital and residential facilities.”
The tit-for-tat strikes mark the latest bout of fighting in the Middle East, where ceasefire deals between the U.S. and Iran and between Israel and Lebanon appear increasingly tenuous, threatening to tip the region back into all-out war.
On Tuesday, Centcom said it had completed “self-defense strikes” at Trump’s direction following the downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter on Monday.
The helicopter was shot down while patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, and two Army aviators were rescued by naval sea drone, in the first rescue of its kind, U.S. officials said.
Trump said afterward that the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond to this attack” in a post on Truth Social. He also shared a short clip from “The West Wing” in which a fictional president, played by Martin Sheen, argues with aides about proportionate responses.
Centcom said the U.S. strikes on Tuesday targeted Iranian air defense, ground control and radar sites, and were a “proportional response to recent attacks on U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”
Iranian state media reported early Wednesday that two desalination plants and a water tank serving the southern city of Sirik were destroyed during the U.S. attack, leaving 20,000 people without access to water in extremely hot weather, Abdulhamid Hamzehpour, the CEO of Hormozgan waterworks, which oversees the area, said in a statement. Temperatures there could surpass 100 degrees on Thursday.
Video posted online by the news outlet Tasnim showed shards of concrete around a rectangular building with a mural on its side. It reads: “Water is the pulse of life, let’s not slow it down by wasting it.” Long blue pipes run from an outer wall into the ground.
In another video, the camera pans down to reveal a pile of debris from the now-collapsed roof in the apparently empty structure. Severed rebar dangles from the top of a wall. The videos, which The Washington Post verified, did not appear to have been previously published. Satellite imagery shows that the building was intact in early May.
The structure “appears to be a typical water reservoir that is built in the Middle East,” said Joseph Bermudez, a senior fellow for imagery analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, who reviewed the imagery at The Post’s request. Bermudez said that the facility sits on an elevated point and that water was probably drawn downward into the town by gravity.
Other experts who reviewed the imagery said that it was difficult to say for certain it was water infrastructure but that it appeared to be a storage vessel with pumps.
Photos published alongside the video showed remnants of a GBU-39 small-diameter bomb, a type that has been used by U.S. and allied forces in Iran, according to two munitions experts who reviewed the images at The Post’s request. They said the damage could have been done by the guided, airdropped bomb, but without additional imagery it was difficult to be certain. The Post could not confirm exactly the where the bomb remnants were found.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a message that they did not participate in the attack. Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said officials were aware of the reports and were looking into them. Centcom did not provide additional details.
A second statement from Hamzehpour said that round-the-clock efforts had restored water to the affected areas.
Trump has faced criticism, including from human rights groups, over threats to attack vital infrastructure in Iran. Under the laws of war, such infrastructure could be either a lawful military target or a civilian object, depending on the facts on the ground, said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department.
“It is not clear if the water tanks were the actual target, but the strike raises major questions about whether it was a lawful military objective and about proportionality,” he said.
For weeks, Trump has said he was close to a deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and impose strict limits on Tehran’s nuclear program. So far, though, the talks have not yielded the grand bargain he has promised, and on Wednesday morning he appeared to acknowledge that the two sides were not about to forge an agreement.
That leaves him in a tricky place politically as November’s midterm elections draw closer, with gas prices high, oil reserves dwindling and growing frustrations from voters about the United States becoming embroiled in a war of choice in the Middle East.
Trump’s options to use military force to solve his domestic political challenges appear limited. The joint U.S.-Israeli operation devastated many elements of Iran’s military, and a U.S. naval blockade is putting pressure on Iran’s economy. But Tehran has shown that it needs only a few mines and drones to throttle shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and upend global energy markets — giving it power that outstrips its military capabilities.
Vice President JD Vance acknowledged the uncertainty over the timeline for a deal in excerpts from an interview with CBS News that were released Tuesday, saying that “the deal could happen in the next week, but the deal could also happen months from now.” He said the goal is to reach a permanent agreement that will outlast the Trump administration and restrain Iran’s nuclear program.
On Wednesday, Trump said the United States has advised more than 200 ships on safely navigating the strait, releasing 100 million barrels of oil onto the global market. Two U.S. officials said the president was referring to an announcement in May that the United States would be guiding vessels through the strait but not sending Navy ships to escort them.
“Nobody knows it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran.”
“Until right now,” he said.
Susannah George and Alex Horton contributed to this report.
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