U.S., Iran escalate strikes as Trump declares ceasefire 'over'

The ceasefire that had held for a month collapsed in a matter of hours on Wednesday. President Trump, standing at a NATO summit in Turkey, declared it finished. By late that evening, American warplanes were over Iran again, striking roughly ninety targets—missile storage facilities, drone depots, air defense systems—in what the Pentagon called a necessary response to Iranian attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz two days earlier. Tehran answered back almost immediately, launching missiles and drones at American military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. The tit-for-tat had resumed, and with it, the fragile agreement signed just weeks before began to unravel.

The immediate trigger was straightforward enough. On Monday and Tuesday, Iranian forces had struck three commercial oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's daily oil supply passes. The U.S. military responded with its first round of strikes on Tuesday, hitting more than eighty Iranian targets. Iran's Revolutionary Guard then turned its attention to the Gulf states hosting American bases—Bahrain, home to the Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters, and Kuwait—sending waves of missiles and drones that set off air raid sirens multiple times through the morning hours. Kuwait's military reported intercepting two ballistic missiles and thirteen drones. Bahrain activated its sirens at least three times. The strikes killed at least three people on the outskirts of the Iranian city of Ahvaz, and Iran acknowledged that eight of its own military personnel—members of the air force and navy—had been killed in the American bombardment.

Trump's language throughout the day made clear his patience had worn thin. At the NATO summit, he called Iranian leaders "scum," "cuckoo," "cancer," and "evil, sick people." When asked about the ceasefire agreement signed in mid-June—a sixty-day window meant to allow for negotiations toward a permanent peace deal—he said simply that it was over, at least in his view. He suggested the U.S. might reinstate a naval blockade of Iranian ports, threatened to seize Kharg Island with its critical oil infrastructure, and warned of strikes on Iran's power plants and water desalination facilities. He also claimed, without evidence, that Iran had killed "thousands and thousands" of American soldiers. Vice President JD Vance, who had been involved in the original negotiations, framed the situation in starkly simple terms: if Iran attacked ships, the U.S. would "knock the hell out of them." If Iran tried to close the Strait of Hormuz, there would be a military response. "It's that simple," he said.

The dispute at the heart of the collapse centers on who controls the Strait of Hormuz and how. The memorandum of understanding signed in June contained fundamentally different interpretations depending on which side was reading it. Iran insisted that all commercial shipping through the strait must coordinate with Iranian maritime authorities—a requirement the U.S. rejected. Washington wanted the waterway to remain open to free passage, as it had been before the war began in February. For Iran, the issue was not merely administrative but strategic: control of the strait represented leverage in any future conflict, a way to threaten global oil supplies if tensions escalated again. Iranian officials told CBS News they viewed the latest American strikes as a serious violation of the agreement. An Iranian lawmaker demanded the U.S. "recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz." State media warned that if attacked again, Iran would immediately close the strait to all traffic and retaliate with twice as many targets. The foreign ministry spokesman claimed the memorandum explicitly gave Iran responsibility for determining safe passage arrangements—a reading the U.S. flatly disputed.

Trump's decision to order the strikes while abroad at the NATO summit caught alliance leaders off guard, though NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte quickly endorsed the action as "absolutely necessary." The market reaction was immediate. Oil prices jumped more than five percent on fears that the escalation could jeopardize supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. Stock markets tumbled in early trading. The European Union's top diplomat said the back-and-forth strikes "further complicate already fraught" peace talks and called for a meeting of EU and Gulf state foreign ministers to discuss preserving freedom of navigation in the strait and the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, thousands of mourners gathered in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala for the funeral procession of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, who was killed in the initial U.S.-Israeli strikes that began the war in late February. His body, draped in the Iranian flag and encased in glass, was carried through streets lined with supporters holding his portrait, some performing acts of self-flagellation as symbols of mourning and calls for revenge. The ceremonies, which had begun on Saturday and would conclude with his burial in Mashhad on Thursday, underscored the deep wounds the conflict had opened and the symbolic weight of the moment. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a key negotiator, responded to Trump's insults with a statement that Iran would answer "not with vulgarity, but with action: fearlessly and with great valor." An Iranian military official dared the U.S. to attempt a ground invasion, promising that any forces landing on Iran's shores would "enter a hell from which it will no longer have a way out."

Analysts watching the collapse pointed to the fundamental incompatibility of the two sides' goals. Aaron David Miller, a former State Department adviser, told CBS News that Iran would never voluntarily surrender control of the Strait of Hormuz, which had become its "new nuclear weapon"—a source of leverage and deterrence. The sixty-day negotiating window, he suggested, had been "tethered to a galaxy far, far away, rather than the realities back on the planet." Trump, for his part, said he did not think the war would "start again" in any sustained way, predicting it would "go very quickly." But the events of the past forty-eight hours suggested otherwise. The ceasefire that had seemed to offer a path toward resolution had fractured, and both sides were now locked in an escalatory cycle with no clear off-ramp in sight.