US and Iran sink into violent cycle after latest strikes

[TEHERAN] The United States and Iran exchanged fire for a second consecutive night on Thursday (Jul 9), extending a pattern of hostilities that has all but collapsed their fragile truce and left the Middle East suspended between war and peace.

Since last month’s ceasefire, periods of uneasy calm have been punctured by sporadic attacks on commercial shipping, blamed on Iran, which are followed by retaliatory US and Iranian strikes, more threats, conflicting signals over negotiations, then another uneasy pause. That cycle repeated itself overnight, with little immediate sign that either is prepared to step back.

The fighting appeared to widen on Thursday as Jordan, which hosts some US military forces, said it had intercepted Iranian missiles in its airspace. Hours earlier, Iran said it had fired at US targets in the Persian Gulf nations of Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain and threatened to expand its attacks to other US military facilities in the region.

Those attacks followed a fresh overnight wave of US strikes in Iran. The flare-up of hostilities sent oil markets wobbling and mediators including Qatar scrambling yet again to prevent further escalation.

Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed Abdulrahman Al Thani, spoke by phone on Thursday with regional counterparts and condemned the attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for global shipping that Iran has sought to control.

The US military said it had struck more than 170 targets in Iran over the previous 48 hours, a significant uptick in the pace and intensity of attacks compared with previous flare-ups during the ceasefire. The latest attacks were designed to degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial ships in the strait, the military said.

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Iranian authorities said US strikes overnight had hit a stretch of railway connecting Teheran to the north-eastern city of Mashhad, where Iran’s slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was to be buried later on Thursday. The US military did not immediately comment on the claim.

Railway authorities said buses would carry stranded passengers the rest of the way. The burial on Thursday follows days of funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli strikes at the start of the war. The events have been meticulously stage-managed by Iran across several cities to project national unity and defiance to Iran’s enemies.

Hours before the latest overnight US strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump dismissed further talks on a long-term peace deal as “a waste of time”, and Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, warned: “Hit, and you’ll be hit.” But as he flew back to Washington, Trump said that Iran had called him because they “want to make a deal so badly.” Iran has not signalled that any new negotiations are underway. NYTIMES