TEHRAN, Iran — President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to forcefully strike Iran after Washington and Tehran exchanged fire for the first time in a month.
“We’re going to hit them hard,” Trump told Fox News, according to the broadcaster’s chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst.
The president vowed there would be “a response” after Iran retaliated to U.S. strikes with an attack on American bases in Jordan.
On Sunday, U.S. forces targeted two rocket launchers on a key island in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. strikes marked the first known attack by American forces since late July, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, said several of its “fighters and compatriots” had been killed and injured in the assault.
It was the first major military escalation in weeks in the war between the U.S. and Iran, which began after American and Israeli forces launched a sweeping assault on Iran in late February, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said in a post on X late Sunday that it had taken “limited” action against IRGC minelaying in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces were observed preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into Strait of Hormuz,” a U.S. official told NBC News.
Last week, Trump said all mines laid in the Strait of Hormuz by Iran had been removed or detonated, and that Iran had been warned that any vessel seeking to lay new ones would be destroyed.
The IRGC vowed “punishment” in response to the U.S. strikes, later announcing it had launched attacks against U.S. military bases in Jordan. Jordan’s military said it had intercepted at least eight missiles Monday morning.
Iran also launched drones at an air base in the United Arab Emirates, with that country’s Defense Ministry saying its air force had “engaged” at least one drone over its territorial waters. Iran’s army said it had targeted locations “where helicopters and troops of the child-killing American military” are stationed at the UAE’s Al Minhad air base.
The Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry warned that the country’s forces would “firmly respond as appropriate to any military aggression,” in a statement carried by the semiofficial Fars news agency.
CENTCOM refuted Tehran’s branding of its attack as an act of “aggression,” saying in its post that “Iran created the threat and the U.S. military eliminated it to protect civilian mariners, commercial shipping, and the free flow of global commerce.”
Speaking with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan on Monday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said “Iran has never welcomed war,” Fars news agency reported. But the U.S. had not “fulfilled its commitments,” he added as efforts toward a lasting peace deal between the U.S. and Iran faltered.
Larak Island, the site targeted by the U.S. strikes, is a small Iranian island located off the coast of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz, the key trade route through which some 20% of the world’s oil passed before the war began.
The vital waterway has been largely closed throughout the conflict, with Iran launching a blockade on the trade route in a move that has sent energy prices soaring, while the U.S. has imposed its own blockade on Iranian ports in response.
