The US military said it attacked and destroyed 16 Iranian vessels laying mines near the Strait of Hormuz amid reports that Iran has begun placing explosive devices in the strategically vital waterway.
Citing intelligence sources, CNN reported Tuesday that Iran has placed a few dozen mines in the strait in recent days and has the capacity to lay hundreds more.
About a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the strait, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said earlier this week that it will not allow even “one liter of oil” to leave the region if US and Israeli attacks continue.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social that “if Iran has placed mines in the Strait of Hormuz and we have no reports that they have done so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!” Less than two hours later, the US military released unclassified footage of its attacks on minelayer vessels.
Oil shipments from the Middle East have been blocked from passing through the narrow waterway since the US and Israeli attacks on Iran 11 days ago, causing oil prices to soar and wreaking havoc on global markets.
The acute sensitivity of oil markets to news about the Strait was underscored Tuesday afternoon when a quickly deleted post by the U.S. energy secretary on social media sparked wild swings in the market.
Raising hopes that the Strait of Hormuz would once again be open for activity, Chris Wright posted on In response, benchmark U.S. crude futures plunged as much as 19%, and an exchange-traded fund tied to oil futures lost $84 million of its market capitalization, the Wall Street Journal reported.
But the post was quickly deleted, and Trump administration officials denied Wright’s claim and clarified that no such expedition had taken place. An Energy Department spokesperson said agency staff had “incorrectly captioned” Wright’s post.
Commenting on Wright’s post, a spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard denied that an oil tanker had been escorted. “Any movement of the US fleet and its allies will be stopped by our missiles and drones,” Ali Mohammad Naini said in comments carried by Iranian state media.
At a Defense Department briefing, top U.S. Gen. Dan Caine addressed the possibility of the U.S. Navy escorting ships through the strait. “We’re looking at a variety of options there and we’ll figure out how to resolve issues as they come to us,” he told reporters.
Along with Caine, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth stated that if “Iran does anything to stop the flow of oil in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States of America will hit it 20 times harder than it has hit it so far.”
Iran has repeatedly targeted energy infrastructure with attacks that appear aimed at generating enough global economic pain to pressure the United States and Israel to end their attacks.
The strait is only 34 kilometers (21 mi) wide at its narrowest point, with the shipping route just two miles wide in either direction. In the 1980s, Iran undermined the chokepoint during its tanker war with Iraq.
On Tuesday, Amin Nasser, chairman and chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil company, said tankers were being diverted to avoid the strait and that the company’s east-west pipeline would reach full capacity this week, with 7 million barrels a day transported to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) also proposed the largest release of oil reserves in its history to counter rising crude prices, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials familiar with the matter.
The release would exceed the 182 million barrels that IEA member countries put on the market in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the newspaper said. The proposal was circulated at an emergency meeting of energy officials from the IEA’s 32 member countries on Tuesday, and a decision is expected on Wednesday.
AP, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
