Democracy Dies with Dictatorship
NY Times
Jun 28, 2026
Mideast Live Updates: Dispute Over Strait Deepens as U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks
In a fourth day of hostilities, Iran said that it had targeted a U.S. naval base in Bahrain and a Kuwaiti air base with drones and missiles. No major damage or casualties were reported.
By Aaron Boxerman, Euan Ward, John Ismay, Tyler Pager and Ephrat Livni
Here’s the latest
Two weeks into a cease-fire agreement aimed at leading to a broader peace agreement, Iran and the United States once again engaged in hostilities on Sunday, with the Iranian foreign minister declaring that his country alone had the authority to manage commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that it had targeted a U.S. naval base in Bahrain and the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait with drones and missiles in retaliation for American attacks. No damage was reported to U.S. facilities, but the skirmishing that began after an attack on a cargo ship in the strait last week has eroded the hopes for a return to normalcy that were prompted by the truce.
U.S. officials blamed Iran for the resumption of hostilities, saying it had launched drone attacks on two vessels in the Strait of Hormuz in recent days. Iran has not claimed responsibility for those attacks, but reiterated on Sunday its demand that vessels follow its designated routes in the strait.
“Under the memorandum of understanding, no other entity or country has any responsibility in this regard,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said during a visit to Iraq on Sunday. Any other arrangement, he said, would add to tensions and could delay the full reopening of the waterway.
What the recent strikes might mean for peace talks was unclear.
A senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations said that no talks had been called off and that technical negotiations over executing the memorandum of understanding were still planned for the coming days. But hours later, Mehdi Fazeli, a member of the office that publishes the works of Iran’s supreme leader, told Iranian state television that Iran had canceled talks scheduled for Sunday.
Another U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly said the Iranian drones and missiles launched in Sunday’s attack had been shot down or intercepted, or had failed to reach their intended targets. The governments of Kuwait and Bahrain said the strikes had not caused any casualties.
A day earlier, the U.S. military hit Iranian air-defense sites and other military infrastructure in “direct response” to an attack earlier on an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. An earlier wave of U.S. strikes were prompted by the initial attack on a container ship in the waters off the coast of Oman on Thursday, U.S. officials said.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Lebanon fighting: The Israeli military said on Sunday it had killed a Hezbollah militant it blamed for the death of an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon. Israel and Lebanon agreed on Friday to a U.S.-backed deal that would lead to the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, rejected that pact, and fighting has continued. More than 4,200 people have been killed and more than 12,000 injured since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah reignited early in March, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Sunday.
Trading accusations: The U.S. and Iran have accused each other of violating the cease-fire, but analysts say neither appears eager for a return to full-blown war. The Revolutionary Guards said in a statement on Sunday that American bases in the region “will be experiencing hell during these days.” On Saturday, President Trump said in a bellicose social media message that the United States would annihilate Iran if it were forced to return to war. Read more on the cease-fire ›
Strait of Hormuz: Strikes on ships are likely to deter vessels from passing through the waterway, which Iran had agreed to fully reopen as part of the cease-fire deal. Read more ›
June 28, 2026, 4:38 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement on Sunday night that the Israeli military had destroyed underground infrastructure of the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where they said weapons intended for strikes against Israel had been found. Before proceeding, Israel informed the United States and the American representative in Lebanon, according to the Israeli leaders, who said the military would remain in the territory it has occupied amid renewed hostilities with Hezbollah. Israel and Lebanon agreed on Friday to a U.S.-backed deal that would lead to the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah has rejected that pact.
June 28, 2026, 4:38 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Shirin Hakim
Hours after a U.S. official told The Times that no negotiations between the United States and Iran had been called off, Mehdi Fazeli, a member of the office that publishes the works of Iran’s supreme leader, told the country’s state broadcaster that Iran had canceled technical talks that had been scheduled for Sunday. Fazeli cited the recent clashes and Tehran’s desire to see whether some conditions of the preliminary cease-fire would be implemented, including access to blocked funds.
June 28, 2026, 4:12 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Shirin Hakim
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, urged Iraq’s prime minister not to allow his territory to be used for attacks on Iran during a meeting in Baghdad on Sunday. Araghchi extended that push to all countries in the region, according to an account of the meeting with Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi that was posted on Araghchi’s official Telegram channel.
Araghchi also attended a meeting on the funeral arrangements for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s late supreme leader, which will include processions at Shiite holy sites in Iraq.
Several days of funeral ceremonies are expected to be held in Iran, beginning in Tehran on July 4 and ending on July 9 in Mashhad, home to the Imam Reza shrine, one of Shiite Islam’s most important sites.
June 28, 2026, 3:48 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Qatar’s Interior Ministry said that a Qatari citizen had been killed and a second person injured after their boat was hit by shrapnel from military operations in the region. The ministry said the vessel failed to return to port as expected on Saturday, setting off a search by maritime units that located the vessel and its two occupants early Sunday. The injured person, whose nationality was not disclosed, was hospitalized in stable condition, according to the ministry.
June 28, 2026, 3:06 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Iran risks its peace talks with the U.S. to maintain leverage over the Strait of Hormuz
The four-day cycle of attacks that Iran set off with the United States over the Strait of Hormuz has risked derailing the newly reached cease-fire in a war both sides are eager to end.
Yet for Iran, analysts say, it was a necessary gambit.
Iran’s newfound power to disrupt traffic through a waterway that is pivotal to the global economy is critical leverage it cannot afford to lose — either at the negotiating table or back at war with the United States.
Last week, Oman and the U.N. International Maritime Organization designated a new route through the waterway that passed only through Omani territorial waters. That could have threatened the linchpin of Iran’s entire strategy — to make sure it alone controlled the strait.
“Best-case or worst-case scenario, they need this leverage,” said Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
It is not clear yet when or where Iran and the United States might meet again for talks. But should that happen, Mr. Vaez said, Iranian officials see their control over the strait as their best tool for extracting U.S. concessions.
The Iranians are seeking relief from years of punishing sanctions if the two sides move forward on a nuclear deal. Such an agreement would most likely entail Iran handing over or diluting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium — material that could have been used to construct a nuclear weapon.
Iran’s potential weaponization of nuclear power, despite its insistence that the program is peaceful, was long seen as its main strategic deterrence. That was until the current war, when Iran demonstrated through limited attacks on the Strait of Hormuz that it could close the waterway and send the global economy into a tailspin.
For Iran’s worst-case scenarios, the strait is central.
Some Iranian officials suspect the Trump administration may have signed a preliminary deal with Iran only to buy time — easing economic pressures ahead of U.S. midterm elections before returning to war after.
If that happened, Iran would again need its ability to wreak havoc in the strait.
“This is really critical. This is their main leverage,” Mr. Vaez said. “It doesn’t make any sense for them to allow it to erode before they have a final deal.”
Tehran feared this erosion was exactly the situation Washington may have been trying to engineer last week, regional experts said.
During a visit to several Gulf Arab states last week, Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, repeatedly asserted that free navigation would return to the strait.
Then came the move by Oman and the International Maritime Organization to establish a new route that bypasses Iranian waters.
“The Iranians understood they’re losing control,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. They probably began to realize their influence works only “during wartime and during a hostile cease-fire, with regular hostilities.”
That is why Iran’s response to the newly announced route was so swift, experts say, in the shape of a strike on Thursday against a Singapore-flagged container ship that used it.
Tehran never claimed responsibility for that attack, nor for a second strike on a vessel on Saturday, both of which elicited U.S. military strikes in return and subsequent Iranian retaliation on U.S. military targets in the Gulf.
On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to deliver a veiled warning to expect more instability if attempts to bypass Iranian control over the waterway persisted.
“Any attempt to adopt new or separate arrangements from those currently being pursued by the Islamic Republic will only lead to further complications, delays in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and an increase in tensions,” he said at a news conference during a visit to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad
Iran’s rulers see the newly devised routes through Omani waters as directly contradicting the fifth article of what Washington signed onto in its memorandum of understanding with Tehran, which laid the foundation for a cease-fire.
In their reading of the vaguely worded document, this article granted Iran oversight of the waterway because it charges Iran with ensuring safe passage through the strait.
It also says that Iran is to conduct dialogue with Oman, the other nation bordering the strait, “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”
From Iran’s perspective, analysts said, the route Oman organized with the U.N. maritime organization — and without consulting Tehran — violated that, and had to be challenged.
Iran’s willingness to provoke conflict amid the peace process aligns with the approach of the country’s new rulers, who want to show they are as willing to strike a deal with Washington as they are to go to war with it, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran analyst who oversees the European Council of Foreign Relations’ Iran Nuclear Monitor.
Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who was killed in the opening salvos of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran in February, had a “no war, no peace” strategy, she said. He long avoided direct confrontation with Washington, but also barred direct high-level talks.
The political elites around his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, “have a different risk appetite,” she said. “The regime is prepared to escalate in bold ways, for example, the recent hits in the strait that could derail the M.O.U. But it is also prepared to unlock peace with America through a new direct, high-level negotiation track.”
Iran’s leaders may also believe this is the right moment to take risks, said Mr. Sabet, because they believe Mr. Trump will be reluctant to restart the war until after the U.S. midterm elections.
Iran and the United States both have good reason to keep negotiating in the face of a frequently violated cease-fire.
For the Trump administration, the war is domestically unpopular, and there is most likely little appetite to return to a conflict that set off a global energy crisis. For Iran, facing economic disaster, oil sanctions waivers and the possibility of unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets are major attractions.
“The economic and military costs of a return to conflict produce enough incentives for both sides to try to keep the memorandum alive,” said Mr. Vaez of the International Crisis Group.
Most political analysts expect Washington and Tehran to continue to extend their initial 60-day negotiating period for many months.
But the repeated flare-ups in violence may mean that the already fragile peace process drags on with little progress.
The more negotiators have to focus on addressing threats to the interim agreement, the less time they have to hammer out an agreement to comprehensively end the conflict and reach a nuclear deal.
“They will have to keep moving to figure out, ‘what do we do about this, what do we do about that?’” said Mr. Sabet of the Geneva Institute. “That doesn’t bode well for progress on the substantive issues that were supposed to come in this second round of talks.”
June 28, 2026, 3:05 p.m. ET3 hours ago
All the drones and missiles launched by Iran in the most recent wave of attacks were shot down, intercepted or failed to reach their intended targets, a U.S. official said on Sunday. According to the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the attack assessment, no American troops were injured and no U.S. military bases affected.
June 28, 2026, 2:46 p.m. ET3 hours ago
A senior U.S. official said technical talks with Iran to discuss how to implement the memorandum of understanding were still planned for the coming days. Despite both sides exchanging strikes in recent days, the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations, said no talks have been canceled and that both sides were exchanging messages via so-called deconfliction channels.
June 28, 2026, 2:22 p.m. ET4 hours ago
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which tracks security at sea, said on Sunday that the threat level for the Strait of Hormuz was “substantial” after recent attacks on vessels on Thursday and on Saturday. Still, the advisory note assessed the overall risk to ships as lower than before the United States and Iran entered an agreement to end hostilities and reopen the strait earlier this month. According to the agency, traffic in the strait has increased, with commercial vessels transiting via both the southern Omani corridor and the northern Iranian-controlled route. “U.S.-assisted commercial transits continued uninterrupted despite the elevated threat environment,” it said.
June 28, 2026, 1:42 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told “Fox News Sunday” that the United States would not allow Iran to “illegally control an international waterway,” days after an attack on a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz set off an exchange of strikes that has tested the cease-fire between the two countries. The U.S. has blamed Iran for the attack on the ship, although Iran has not claimed responsibility.
Waltz said President Trump would not “stand by while Iran continues to attack international shipping without a response.” Earlier Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that his country was solely responsible for managing the strait under the terms of the preliminary agreement.
June 28, 2026, 1:18 p.m. ET5 hours ago
Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, condemned the recent attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait and in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil and gas that was supposed to be reopened under a cease-fire agreement between Iran and the United States. “These reckless attacks, including on international shipping, are putting civilian lives at risk, and curtailing freedom of navigation,” she wrote on social media.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that it had targeted U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait in retaliation for American attacks. But Iran has not claimed responsibility for attacking ships in the strait, where it says vessels must seek its permission to transit. U.S. officials blamed Iran for an attack on a container ship that reignited the hostilities and forced a pause of an evacuation of hundreds of ships that have been stranded since late February.
June 28, 2026, 12:51 p.m. ET5 hours ago
The Israeli military said that its troops had eliminated a Hezbollah militant it said was responsible for the death of an Israeli soldier that had been killed in fighting in southern Lebanon. The military said it would “continue to operate to remove any threat” to its soldiers and Israeli civilians by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group.
Israel and Lebanon agreed on Friday to a U.S.-backed deal that would lead to the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, a pact Hezbollah has rejected. More than 4,200 people have been killed and more than 12,000 injured since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah reignited early in March, the Lebanese health ministry said on Sunday.
June 28, 2026, 10:27 a.m. ET8 hours ago
Reporting from Tel Aviv
The Israeli military’s chief of staff has vowed to adhere to the country’s peace agreement with Lebanon, even as fighting has continued with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, there. “We will honor the agreement and work toward its success,” Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said in a statement on Sunday, in his first public remarks on the deal that was agreed on Friday. But, he added, Israeli troops remain in control of parts of southern Lebanon and are “prepared for a swift return to fighting.”
On Sunday, the Israeli military said a soldier was killed in fighting in southern Lebanon.