Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Steps Up Attacks in Strait as Energy Fears Unsettle Markets

U.S. warplanes and attack helicopters are hitting Iranian targets in an effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, officials said. The price of oil remained high as new strikes hit Gulf energy facilities.

by Adam RasgonFrancesca Regalado and Ashley Ahn

Here’s the latest.

U.S. warplanes and attack helicopters have ramped up assaults against Iranian drones and naval vessels in an effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, American officials said, as oil prices remained high on Friday amid new attacks on energy sites in the Persian Gulf.

As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran approached the three-week mark, American commanders have been scrambling to accelerate plans to thwart Iran’s ability to choke off the strait, the critical passageway in and out of the Persian Gulf. Iran has used a lethal combination of mines, missiles and armed drones — or the threat of using them — to all but shut down shipping through the strait, through which passes a large part of the world’s oil and natural gas.

The war cast a pall over celebrations for Eid al-Fitr, a holiday marking the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Iran fired more retaliatory strikes, with several U.S. allies saying they were responding to incoming drones and missiles.

The state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said a drone attack had caused fires at the Mina al-Ahmadi refinery, for the second consecutive day. Israel said it had launched targeted attacks on Tehran after Iranian missile fire set off sirens in Jerusalem and northern Israel overnight.

The sustained and wide-ranging strikes on energy sites have prompted the Trump administration to scramble for solutions. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday that the United States was planning to lift sanctions on Iranian oil in an effort to shore up the global market, reversing years of U.S. measures to cripple Tehran’s economy.

President Trump said he had told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to stop attacking Iran’s energy fields. He also tried to reassure Americans on the economic impact of the war, saying on Thursday, “It will be over soon,” without explaining.

The president lashed out once again at NATO allies for not joining in the fight against Iran, or heeding his call to send warships to escort shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. “COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!” he wrote in a social media post.

Oil prices eased slightly on Friday morning but remained high, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, still trading at more than $108 per barrel, up from roughly $72 per barrel before the war began. The S&P 500 was on course for a fourth straight week of losses for the first time since about a year ago, around the time that the Trump administration introduced its tariffs.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Israeli strike: The Israeli military said it had killed the spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ali Mohammed Naini, in a strike on Friday. A statement from the Guards Corps carried by Iranian state television confirmed he was killed, but did not offer details. The statement said the longtime general had led the force’s “cognitive war” against adversaries. The Israeli military described him as the group’s “main propagandist.”

• New attacks: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates said on Friday they were intercepting drone and missile attacks, which Emirati and Bahraini officials said were coming from Iran. The authorities in Bahrain said that falling shrapnel had started a fire at a warehouse.

• War budget: Mr. Trump said he would seek an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund the war with Iran. The sum, which is nearly a quarter of the United States’ annual defense budget, has already encountered some resistance from Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

• Death tolls: Iran’s U.N. ambassador said last week that at least 1,348 civilians had been killed since the start of the war. On Wednesday, a Washington-based human rights group, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, reported that at least 1,369 civilians had been killed. The number of Lebanese killed rose to more than 1,000, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday. At least 14 people have been killed in Iranian attacks on Israel, officials have said. The American death toll stood at 13.

NATO withdraws its last remaining military trainers from Iraq.

NATO withdrew the last of its military trainers from Iraq on Friday, as the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran continued to prompt retaliatory attacks in other Persian Gulf countries, including Iraq.

The alliance’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, said in a statement that it was “safely relocating” the Iraq mission personnel to Europe.

The NATO mission in Iraq was created in 2018 as a noncombat training and advisory effort to bolster badly shaken Iraqi security forces. At the time, the Islamic State was retreating from its deadly rampage in northern Iraq and Syria. The NATO mission sought to ensure that Iraqi forces could stabilize their country and prevent the Islamic State’s return.

Its departure came 23 years to the day after an American-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple its president, Saddam Hussein, triggering a civil war that left the country unstable and vulnerable. U.S. combat troops withdrew at the end of 2011, and months later the Islamic State insurgency began.

NATO’s top commander, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich of the United States, thanked Iraqi officials and allies in a statement Friday announcing that the security mission was being relocated to Naples, Italy. It was not clear when, or if, they would return.

Among the Iraqi armed groups that fought the Islamic State were militias backed by Iran. American and Iranian-backed forces have clashed repeatedly in Iraq, including militias that have targeted American diplomatic posts as recently as last week.

Allison Hart, a NATO spokesperson, said the alliance’s training mission would continue. “The safety and security of our personnel is paramount,” she said. She declined to provide additional details.

Deferring to Trump, G.O.P. lawmakers resist a public accounting on Iran.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have given President Trump wide latitude to wage war on Iran with no congressional approval or limits.

They have deferred to him almost entirely on his justifications for the conflict, echoing the rationales offered by him and his top officials, even as they have given shifting and contradictory explanations.

Now, nearly three weeks after the first strikes on Tehran, G.O.P. lawmakers are resisting the idea of calling top administration officials before Congress to give a public accounting for an escalating war with uncertain objectives, a rising price tag and no clear exit strategy.

It is the latest example of how the Republicans controlling Congress, who have ceded power to Mr. Trump on matters large and small, are refraining from using their oversight authority as a coequal branch of government and have instead taken on the role of cheerleaders for his policies at a critical time.

“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”

Democrats have demanded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio make the case under oath in congressional hearings for why the United States barreled into a war in the Middle East that has endangered American citizens, diplomats and allies across the region and caused oil prices to spike.

But even as the Pentagon requests $200 billion to fund the conflict and Mr. Trump has not flatly ruled out committing ground troops, many Republicans argue that summoning Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Rubio to Capitol Hill for televised hearings would be harmful because it would put the divisions over the war on display for the country, and for Iran, to see.

“I think it would be very unhealthy at this point in time,” said Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve got men and women in harm’s way.”

“The more cameras on someone in the Democrat party, the more bombastic they get,” said Representative Derrick Van Orden, Republican of Wisconsin. “It can be counterproductive.”

Republican leaders and rank-and-file members have said Mr. Trump is firmly within his authority to deploy forces into hostilities with Iran for up to 60 days without congressional authorization.

Democrats note that under the law, that power applies only if the United States faced an imminent attack, and they argue that the Trump administration has failed to prove that the threat posed by Iran met that benchmark. Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Rubio have rejected that reasoning, but testimony from two top intelligence officials on Wednesday directly contradicted the claim that an imminent threat existed.

House and Senate Democrats are pressing to publicly question cabinet officials about the strategic goals of the campaign and the expected total cost of an operation that exceeded $11.3 billion in just the first week, among other topics. And they want to ask about efforts to mitigate civilian deaths after an initial Pentagon investigation found that the United States launched a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school.

But Republicans have said they are satisfied with the information senior Trump administration officials have provided in several classified briefings since the war began, and see no need for a public accounting.

“The case has been very clearly made by the administration in public comments,” said Representative Brian Mast, Republican of Florida and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He called the request from Democrats for public hearings “total B.S.”

In recent days, Republicans in the House and Senate have made the remarkable argument that there is no need for them to question Trump administration officials under oath about the war because those officials are already fielding news media questions about it.

“They’re holding news conferences,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, told reporters last week. “You guys are covering them and putting out all the relevant information about the status of the conflict.”

Polls show a majority of Americans disapproving of Mr. Trump sending U.S. forces to attack Iran, with support for military operations registering far lower than at the outset of past wars.

But at a news conference on Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson essentially argued that Americans should trust members of Congress to pass on whatever information they might need to know about the conflict. He called the operations against Iran “very sensitive” and said they could not be discussed outside the classified settings where lawmakers had been briefed on them “because it would adversely affect our mission.”

“I have just relayed to you the summary of the nonclassified information,” Mr. Johnson told reporters. “All members are out talking about it around the clock. You’re following them around with microphones getting their clips and insights and their opinions.”

While Mr. Hegseth has held several news conferences since the start of the war, the Pentagon has limited access and invited pro-Trump outlets to take the place of journalists from national media organizations that refused to accept the department’s reporting restrictions. Mr. Rubio has not held a news conference at the State Department since December, though he took questions from reporters while on Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers in the opening days of the war.

Democrats have accused their colleagues across the aisle of rubber-stamping the president’s war without performing any oversight. A military operation as significant as the one unfolding in the Middle East is analogous to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, they have argued, noting that Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state at the time, made the case to Congress for that mission, and lawmakers voted to authorize it, before it began.

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said it was “unprecedented in American history to launch a war of this scale without open hearings.”

He is part of a group of Senate Democrats forcing a series of votes on war powers resolutions on Iran to try to pressure Republicans into holding public hearings.

“They want to circumvent the Constitution,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said on the floor on Wednesday before Republicans voted again to block a measure that would curb Mr. Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional authorization. “They want to go around public oversight. They want to avoid the glare, the questions of the American people.”

Mr. Booker and Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, both said on Wednesday that Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told them during a classified briefing that morning that he was not planning to call Mr. Rubio to testify about the conflict.

Mr. Risch declined to comment, noting in an interview that the exchange occurred in a classified setting.

Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he “expects” Mr. Hegseth would eventually be called to testify before his committee in public, but he left the timing vague and said it would not be before lawmakers return from a two-week recess in mid-April.

Mr. Thune has suggested the next time the cabinet members would appear before Congress would be for hearings on the president’s annual budget request. “I’m sure all these issues will be litigated,” he added. “But this is a very fast-moving situation.”

A small group of Republicans have pressed for a more open dialogue on the war.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said on Wednesday that she would probably want a public hearing on the supplemental funding request that will be required to pay for the operations. “It’s considerably higher than I would have guessed,” she said of the $200 billion figure being discussed.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a member of the Appropriations subcommittee that controls military spending who has participated in classified briefings in recent days, called for public hearings and expressed frustration that the Trump administration had attacked Iran unilaterally, without consulting Congress.

“I’m asking others, ‘Why are we not talking about the war?’” Ms. Murkowski said.

She added: “As a sitting United States senator, I think I deserve to have honest answers. So when I see the secretary of defense and the president of the United States, who are not giving clear answers publicly, that makes it hard for me to go back and tell my constituents, ‘OK, here’s what we think we should expect going forward.’”

Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican facing a competitive re-election race, said he wanted to see senior officials testify, and “the sooner the better.”

“Of course it’s necessary,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “We should have oversight.”