PROFILE: Hormuz emptied of ships, the strait Tehran managed to paralyze

Introduction: a strait draining out like never before since 2026

A global oil artery grinding to a halt

Some places matter not because of how many people live there, but because of how many barrels pass through. The Strait of Hormuz is the perfect example: this narrow maritime chokepoint squeezed between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula normally carries close to a fifth of the world's oil. Since the start of July 2026, this strategic corridor has steadily drained of commercial traffic, until the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps proclaimed, on July 12, the outright closure of the waterway.

This is not a minor statement. Closing, even symbolically, one of the most watched sea lanes on the planet sends a signal to the entire global energy market, not just to the capitals of the Gulf. The IRGC Navy claimed it fired warning shots at a vessel attempting to use an unauthorized route, a gesture that by itself sums up the logic of maritime coercion Tehran has chosen to display publicly.

A portrait of a corridor under constant strain since February

This blockade did not come out of nowhere. Since the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, in the opening hours of the joint American-Israeli offensive, the Strait of Hormuz has become the recurring stage for a maritime war of attrition made of radio warnings, boardings, sea mines, and now repeated retaliatory strikes. Every week adds another layer of tension to a corridor that has never returned to normal operation since February 28.

This portrait of an emptied strait is therefore not the story of an isolated accident, but of a slow strangulation, where every attack on a commercial vessel makes a return to stabilized navigation a little less likely. It is this accumulation, more than any single episode, that explains why shipping companies have started rerouting their cargo far from this otherwise irreplaceable route.

We should be careful not to reduce this story to a simple oil price line on a trading screen. Behind every percentage drop in maritime traffic are real crews, sailors who take concrete risks every time a shipowner decides to attempt the crossing anyway.

I watch this strait empty out with a concern that goes far beyond the oil question. When a regional power demonstrates it can close, even temporarily, an artery this vital, the entire global economy learns a lesson that Iran under Mojtaba Khamenei has not finished bragging about.

The July 7 attack, the breaking point

Two tankers hit within hours

On July 7, 2026, two tankers were struck by projectiles inside the strait: the Qatari LNG tanker Al Rekayat and the Saudi supertanker Wedyan. Both vessels sustained significant damage, and the Al Rekayat had to be evacuated after a fire broke out in its engine room, an incident that put it at risk of explosion according to available information on the sequence. Qatar accused Iran of being responsible for the attack on its tanker, while Iranian state media itself suggested Iranian responsibility without ever issuing a formal claim.

This calculated ambiguity, hovering between media insinuation and official denial, has become a trademark of Tehran's strategy in this phase of the conflict. It allows the regime to maintain coercive pressure on commercial traffic while avoiding formal responsibility that would expose it to even more direct escalation with Washington.

A third ship targeted within 24 hours

Less than twenty-four hours after this double attack, the IRGC struck a third vessel in the strait, confirming that the July 7 episode was not an isolated incident but the opening of a deliberate campaign of maritime harassment. This acceleration in the pace of attacks immediately changed the risk calculus among international shipowners, several of whom began suspending their crossings of the strait in the days that followed.

The American response was swift. The U.S. Treasury Department reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil exports that had been lifted after the signing of the Islamabad memorandum, while CENTCOM announced a wave of strikes targeting Iranian military sites near the strait. The spiral of mutual retaliation was back in motion, barely three weeks after a deal meant to end it.

Three ships targeted in less than a day is no longer maritime tension, it is an open show of force. That Iran chose this exact moment, in the middle of national funerals, to intensify its attacks says a great deal about the cynical calculation of a regime that uses mourning as a strategic shield.

The GFS Galaxy container ship, a symbol of the escalation

A Cypriot vessel badly damaged

On July 11, 2026, the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy suffered heavy damage to its engine room, in what CENTCOM directly attributed to an Iranian strike. The crew, which included eleven Indian nationals, had to abandon the vessel in a lifeboat. Ten crew members were later rescued, while one sailor remained missing, a human toll that is a reminder that behind every shipping-traffic statistic are real lives put in danger.

This episode precipitated, the very next day, the decision by the IRGC Navy to formally declare the strait closed, after claiming it had fired warning shots at a vessel attempting to use an unauthorized route. The timeline leaves no ambiguity: it was the escalation of attacks on civilian ships that preceded, not followed, the closure proclaimed by Tehran.

American retaliatory strikes on Qeshm Island

In direct response to the attack on the GFS Galaxy, the United States launched strikes against Iranian missile batteries, air defense systems, and IRGC fast boats at several sites around the strait, including military targets on Qeshm Island. Iranian news agencies Mehr and Tasnim, citing a local official, reported that these strikes killed Iranian naval lieutenant Hamidreza Dehghani at the southern port of Jask.

This sequence of blows and counter-blows illustrates the machine that has taken hold in the strait since July 7: every attack on a commercial vessel triggers an American military response, which itself feeds the logic of closure and retaliation on the Iranian side. Neither camp today seems willing to break this cycle.

A missing sailor, a dead Iranian lieutenant, missile batteries pulverized: that is the concrete human price of a geopolitical arm-wrestling match that many still discuss as a simple oil price line. We need to name what is really at stake in this strait, lives, not just barrels.

The 140 targets struck by Washington

A strike campaign of unprecedented scale in months

On July 12, 2026, American authorities announced they had struck around 140 Iranian military targets, an operation CENTCOM described as targeting missile and drone sites, naval capabilities, munitions storage facilities, as well as communications networks and coastal surveillance posts. This is the third wave of American strikes against Iran in a matter of days, a pace that reflects Washington's determination to prevent any lasting closure of the strait.

This scale of strikes, comparable in places to the campaigns waged in spring 2026, confirms that the conflict opened on February 28 never truly stopped despite diplomatic mediation attempts. The Islamabad memorandum signed on June 17 between Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian looks, as of July 12, like a ceasefire in name only that both sides have largely trampled.

The clear message sent by CENTCOM

Facing Iranian claims of control over the waterway, CENTCOM published an unambiguous message on social media stating that Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz. This formula, as blunt as it is categorical, sums up the American position: no Iranian declaration of closure can carry legal or operational weight as long as the U.S. Navy continues to secure certain shipping lanes.

This head-on rejection of the legitimacy of the closure proclaimed by the IRGC keeps a dangerous ambiguity alive: on paper, the strait remains open according to Washington, but in practice, nearly all commercial shipowners have chosen to avoid the zone, which amounts, for the global economy, to a de facto closure regardless of the talking points each side employs.

Whether the strait is "officially" closed or only "de facto" closed makes no difference to oil markets, which react to facts, not talking points. This semantic war between Washington and Tehran masks a blunter reality: traffic has collapsed, full stop.

The Iranian missiles on four Gulf countries

Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain struck in one night

On July 9 and 10, 2026, Iran fired missiles at American bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, in what several regional outlets described as a second consecutive night of American strikes followed by widespread Iranian retaliation. Jordan announced it had intercepted Iranian missiles over its territory, while the United Arab Emirates intercepted missiles and drones as part of the same wave of attacks.

This geographic expansion of the conflict to four countries simultaneously marks a break from the previously contained logic of strikes limited to Iranian territory and the maritime zones of the strait. By targeting American bases on the soil of regional partners, Tehran chose to deliberately internationalize a conflict many had still hoped was contained.

Explosions near the Bushehr power plant

Explosions were also reported at Bandar Abbas and in Bushehr province, home to Iran's only operational nuclear power plant. While precise details on the nature of these explosions remain uncertain at this stage, their proximity to a civilian nuclear facility immediately raised concerns among regional observers, in a context where any strike, accidental or deliberate, near a nuclear site carries disproportionate risks.

This nuclear dimension adds a further layer of gravity to an already multifaceted crisis, where oil, military, and diplomatic stakes are now tangled together with the increasingly pressing question of the security of Iranian atomic infrastructure in an active war zone.

Striking near an operational nuclear plant, even without direct intent, is playing with a risk no one should normalize. This war has long passed the point where this kind of strategic sloppiness could be tolerated.

The global economic impact of a paralyzed corridor

A fifth of the world's oil hanging by a thread

The Strait of Hormuz is not just one passage among others: about a fifth of the world's oil transits through it under normal conditions, making it one of the most closely watched energy chokepoints on the planet. Any lasting disruption of this corridor mechanically translates into upward pressure on global oil prices, with repercussions that go well beyond the Gulf region to hit importing economies in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Earlier data from this conflict, notably the spike in oil prices above 120 dollars a barrel observed in March 2026 after the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei and the announced closure of the strait at that time, confirms the extreme sensitivity of markets to every signal of deterioration in this zone. The situation in July 2026, marked by repeated attacks and an explicitly proclaimed IRGC closure, sits within the aggravated continuation of that same dynamic.

An American response that went through a naval blockade

Between April 13 and May 29, 2026, the United States had already imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, a measure reflecting Washington's intent to exert direct economic pressure on Tehran alongside military operations. On June 27, the Joint Maritime Information Center overseen by the U.S. Navy had announced the opening of a widened route through the strait, near Oman, allowing increased two-way naval traffic and explicitly defying the control claimed by Iran over the waterway.

This alternation of pressure measures and forced reopening attempts illustrates the structural difficulty of durably stabilizing this corridor as long as the underlying conflict between Washington and Tehran has not found a political resolution more solid than the Islamabad memorandum, whose reach proved limited in the face of July's events.

You can multiply widened corridors and alternate routes all you want, but as long as civilian ships remain potential targets, no technical fix will replace a real ceasefire held by both sides. Shipowners themselves are not reassured by press releases.

The context of Ali Khamenei's death and its aftermath

The February 28 operation that triggered everything

Nothing happening today in the Strait of Hormuz can be understood without going back to the origin of this war: on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran under the name Operation Epic Fury, targeting military installations, nuclear sites, and command targets. These strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an event that immediately plunged the country into an unprecedented succession crisis in the history of the Islamic Republic.

In response, Iran retaliated with missile barrages on Israeli cities and American bases in the Gulf, notably in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, causing casualties and significant material damage. In the hours following the February 28 strikes, the IRGC issued VHF radio warnings to ships present in the strait, informing them that no vessel would be allowed to cross it, laying the groundwork for the maritime blockage that has never fully stopped since.

A four-month war that never truly ended

Between February 28 and July 12, more than four months passed without the conflict finding a lasting resolution, despite the signing of the Islamabad memorandum on June 17. This duration, exceptionally long for a clash of this intensity between major regional and global powers, gave time for a multitude of parallel crises to take hold: a contested political succession, an exhausted Iranian economy, a paralyzed maritime corridor, and now national funerals serving as backdrop to a new military escalation.

This accumulation of simultaneous crises explains why the Strait of Hormuz file can no longer be analyzed in isolation. It now constitutes one of multiple fronts in a systemic confrontation between a weakened Iran and an American-Israeli coalition determined to prevent any rebuilding of the regime's military and nuclear capabilities.

Four months of war, a chaotic succession, a closed strait: the Iranian regime has never looked this fragile since 1979, and it is precisely this fragility that makes every decision Tehran makes in the Strait of Hormuz as unpredictable as it is dangerous for the rest of the world.

International shipowners facing the risk

Companies abandoning the route

Faced with the multiplication of attacks on commercial vessels since July 7, many international shipping companies have begun rerouting their cargo far from the Strait of Hormuz, even though this means considerably longer and more costly journeys via other maritime routes. This gradual desertion of the corridor reflects a risk assessment that now far exceeds the industry's usual tolerance thresholds, despite it being accustomed to zones of high geopolitical tension.

The narrowly averted sinking of the Al Rekayat, the partial rescue of the GFS Galaxy crew, and the disappearance of a sailor concretely illustrate why maritime insurers have raised their risk premiums for any crossing of the strait, further reinforcing the economic incentive to simply avoid it altogether.

More than twenty attacks recorded since the conflict began

According to counts established in spring 2026, more than twenty attacks on ships have been recorded in the Gulf region since the start of this war in February, a figure that has necessarily continued to grow with the episodes of July. This accumulation of documented incidents is the most tangible proof that the Strait of Hormuz has not been, for several months now, a secure navigation zone in the conventional sense of the term.

This is not a journalistic exaggeration: it is an operational reality weighing more heavily every day on global energy supply chains, which explains why some analysts now openly speak of a risk of a lasting oil crisis if the situation does not stabilize in the coming weeks.

Twenty attacks in four months is no longer an isolated incident that can be shrugged off, it is a deliberate policy of maritime harassment that the Iranian regime is increasingly openly embracing. It needs to be called by its name, an economic war against the rest of the world.

The Islamabad memorandum, a trampled deal

A nuclear status-quo commitment already violated

The memorandum signed on June 17, 2026 between Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian notably committed Iran to maintaining the status quo of its nuclear program. Yet satellite imagery analysis published in early July revealed continued construction activity at the underground site of Pickaxe Mountain, suspected of housing an undeclared enrichment facility, constituting a clear violation of that commitment according to several non-proliferation experts.

This documented violation of the nuclear portion of the deal compounds the collapse of the maritime portion, with attacks on commercial ships resuming as early as July 7, barely three weeks after the memorandum was signed. The Islamabad agreement thus appears, as of July 12, as a text largely emptied of substance by the concrete actions of both parties.

A ceasefire Trump himself declared over

Faced with the accumulation of these violations, the American president himself declared the ceasefire over, opening the way for the waves of retaliatory strikes that followed. This official declaration marks a turning point: it publicly acknowledges the failure of a de-escalation attempt that had nonetheless been presented, at the time of its signing, as a major diplomatic breakthrough.

This return to open confrontation, less than a month after the signing of a deal meant to end it, illustrates the structural fragility of any mediation in this conflict as long as the core questions, the survival of Iran's nuclear program and control of the Strait of Hormuz, remain unresolved on the ground.

A ceasefire that collapses in three weeks was probably never a real ceasefire, only a tactical pause each camp used to reposition itself. History may well remember Islamabad as the deal that never really held.

Khamenei's funeral as a backdrop

A timing coincidence heavy with meaning

The intensification of attacks in the Strait of Hormuz comes precisely during the week of Ali Khamenei's state funeral, held from July 3 to 9, 2026, between Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala, and Mashhad. This timing coincidence is probably not accidental: several regional observers believe the regime may have sought to demonstrate its capacity for military disruption precisely at the moment when its domestic authority was being tested by this symbolic transition.

Iranian news agencies themselves reported that American strikes had targeted two bridges on a railway leading to Mashhad, where the body of the late supreme leader was to be buried, adding a further layer of tension between the funeral ceremonies and the continuation of active military operations.

A real-world test for the new leadership

This funeral week also constitutes the first major public test for the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, appointed in March but largely absent from public appearances since his designation. His handling, or lack of visible handling, of this maritime crisis unfolding alongside his father's funeral will say a great deal about the real nature of the power he now wields over the country's security apparatus.

This convergence between national mourning and military escalation illustrates the deeply unstable situation Iran finds itself in during mid-2026, a country that must simultaneously manage an unprecedented power transition and an open war on several fronts, maritime, aerial, and now regional.

Using one's own father's funeral as a strategic shield to intensify a maritime war is a cynical reading that deserves to be stated plainly. National mourning should never serve as cover for a deliberate military escalation.

The repercussions for America's regional allies

American bases directly targeted

The Iranian strikes of July 9 and 10 against American bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain demonstrate that the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz can no longer be isolated from the rest of America's military presence in the region. Every American regional partner now finds itself directly exposed to Iranian retaliation, which considerably complicates Washington's ability to maintain a strictly defensive posture.

This expansion of the battlefield also forces Gulf countries to review their own air defense systems, as illustrated by the successful interception of missiles and drones by the United Arab Emirates during this same wave of attacks, a defensive success that limits damage but does nothing to resolve the source of the problem.

Western solidarity put to the test

This multiplication of fronts also tests the solidarity of Western partners in a conflict that stretches on with no clear path to resolution. The logistical and military support provided by the United States to its Gulf allies, along with coordination with Israel since February 28, remains an essential pillar for containing the regional ambitions of a weakened but still significantly disruptive Iranian regime.

It is precisely this capacity for disruption, demonstrated again in the Strait of Hormuz, that justifies maintaining firm Western pressure on Tehran, both militarily and through the economic sanctions reimposed in early July.

This war is no longer just Israeli-Iranian or American-Iranian, it has become a regional crisis that engages the security of several Western allies simultaneously. This needs to be clearly acknowledged rather than continuing to speak of a contained conflict that has not been contained for a long time.

What this crisis reveals about the real state of the Iranian regime

Diminished military capacity, but not destroyed

Despite more than four months of repeated American and Israeli strikes, Iran retains enough capacity for disruption to paralyze one of the world's most strategic energy corridors. This operational persistence, despite documented losses such as that of Lieutenant Hamidreza Dehghani in Jask, shows that the regime, though weakened, has not been stripped of its asymmetric means of action at sea.

This residual capacity explains why American officials keep insisting on the need for preemptive strikes against remaining Iranian military infrastructure, rather than treating the conflict as substantially over after the initial successes of Operation Epic Fury in February.

A political fragility that fuels the escalation

The regime's internal political fragility, illustrated by the persistent absence of Mojtaba Khamenei from public appearances and by the implicit contestation of the legitimacy of a dynastic succession, could paradoxically push certain elements of the Iranian security apparatus to multiply external shows of force to compensate for this perceived internal weakness.

This reading, which remains a cautious interpretation rather than an established fact, nonetheless offers a coherent framework for understanding why the maritime escalation intensified precisely during the most symbolically sensitive week for Iranian power since February 28.

A regime that doubts its own domestic legitimacy often tends to seek external victories, even symbolic ones, to compensate. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, even temporarily, offers exactly this kind of easy trophy to sell to a population exhausted by four months of war.

The March precedent, when Hormuz already trembled

A first closure announced after Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment

This is not the first time in 2026 that the Strait of Hormuz has found itself at the center of a closure announcement. In March 2026, in the days following the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as new supreme leader by the Assembly of Experts, oil prices had already broken the 120-dollar mark per barrel, their highest level since 2022, amid similar fears about navigation safety in the strait. This spike immediately followed the new supreme leader's first statements on the need to continue attacks in the waterway.

The spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, had then tried to reassure international observers by claiming the country would rally behind Mojtaba Khamenei despite lingering questions over the legitimacy of a hereditary transfer of power. That March sequence already foreshadowed, in embryonic form, the dynamic of maritime pressure that would repeat and worsen over the summer.

A repetition that confirms a strategy rather than an accident

The fact that the Strait of Hormuz experienced two major episodes of closure or near-closure within four months, in March and again in July, rules out the hypothesis of an isolated incident in favor of a deliberate and recurring strategy on the part of IRGC command. Each surge of domestic political tension seems to be accompanied, almost mechanically, by a show of force in the strait.

This regularity particularly worries energy analysts, who fear that the Strait of Hormuz could durably become an instrument of Iranian domestic policy, deployed every time the regime goes through a phase of perceived fragility, whether a contested succession or, as in July, a moment of national mourning diverted for strategic ends.

Two closures of the same strait in four months is no longer a geopolitical coincidence, it is a playbook that Tehran knowingly repeats every time its power feels vulnerable. It is time to stop treating each episode as an isolated event and start naming the strategy for what it is.

The voices calling for a coordinated international response

Calls for a multinational maritime protection force

Faced with the repetition of attacks on commercial vessels of multiple nationalities, Qatari, Saudi, and Cypriot for the documented episodes of July alone, several Western diplomatic voices have begun raising the need for a multinational naval force dedicated to protecting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, modeled on maritime coalitions already existing in other risk zones. Such an initiative would go beyond the current American presence alone to more directly engage European and Asian powers dependent on Gulf oil.

This option remains, at this stage, more a line of thinking than a concrete project, but it reflects a growing awareness that securing the strait can no longer rest solely on American deterrence capacity, especially in a context where that alone has not been enough to prevent the multiplication of attacks since February.

China's ambiguous role as a major buyer of Iranian oil

Any discussion of the future of the Strait of Hormuz must also take into account the role of China, which remains one of the main buyers of Iranian oil despite international sanctions, and therefore has a direct interest in stabilizing the corridor, without publicly displaying a clear will to pressure Tehran to achieve it. This Chinese ambiguity illustrates the complexity of the fault lines running through this file well beyond the sole standoff between Washington and Tehran.

This position of an interested but passive observer adopted by Beijing fits within a broader logic where China seeks to benefit from Western difficulties in the Middle East without exposing itself directly, a posture that should alert Western capitals to the limits of their influence in a region where other powers are quietly advancing their own pieces.

That China benefits from this chaos without ever exposing itself directly should surprise no one, but it should further alarm Western capitals about the need to reclaim the diplomatic initiative in the Gulf before other powers impose their own rules of the game.

Conclusion: a corridor that will remain under tension

No lasting resolution in sight

At the end of this factual reconstruction, one conclusion stands out: the Strait of Hormuz did not simply empty out by circumstantial accident, it was gradually paralyzed by a deliberate escalation that now stretches over more than four months, since February 28, 2026. Every de-escalation attempt, including the June 17 Islamabad memorandum, has run into documented violations that pulled both camps back toward open confrontation.

Nothing, as of July 12, 2026, allows for anticipating a quick stabilization of this strategic corridor. Attacks on commercial ships, American retaliatory strikes, and Iranian missile fire on regional bases continue to unfold according to a logic that, for now, escapes any credible diplomatic mediation.

A story that goes far beyond the oil question alone

This Strait of Hormuz file must now be read as the symptom of a broader systemic crisis, combining a contested political succession in Iran, persistent violation of nuclear non-proliferation commitments, and the inability of international diplomacy to impose a lasting de-escalation between Tehran and Washington. Oil is only the most visible variable of a confrontation that affects, at its core, the entire regional order of the Middle East.

Until this structural confrontation finds a political resolution more solid than a memorandum trampled three weeks after its signing, the Strait of Hormuz will remain what it has become since February 2026: a corridor under permanent hostage, where every ship that risks it becomes, against its will, a geopolitical stake.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

What I know and what I don't know

I know that on July 7, 2026, the tankers Al Rekayat and Wedyan were struck in the Strait of Hormuz, that a third vessel was targeted within the following 24 hours, and that the container ship GFS Galaxy suffered heavy damage on July 11, leading the crew to abandon the vessel. I know that the IRGC Navy declared the strait closed on July 12, and that CENTCOM announced it had struck around 140 Iranian military targets that same day. I also know that Iranian missiles targeted Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain on July 9 and 10.

I do not know with certainty the exact scale of the drop in maritime traffic as a percentage, nor the precise number of companies that have permanently rerouted their lines as of publication. These precise figures were not available in the sources consulted, and I prefer to say so clearly rather than putting forward an unverified estimate.

Method

This article draws on the timeline established by Wikipedia regarding the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, on Reuters dispatches from July 3 and 12, 2026, concerning Khamenei's funeral and the American strikes, as well as on coverage from The National, the BBC, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis from July 8, 2026, on the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site. No scene has been invented and no direct testimony is claimed.

My editorial angle remains explicit: I consider the Iranian maritime escalation to be part of a deliberate strategy of regional coercion, and I treat IRGC closure declarations with the same methodological skepticism as any other unsubstantiated claim not corroborated by independent evidence, while acknowledging the documented reality of the damage inflicted on commercial ships.

Sources

Primary sources

United States says it struck 140 Iranian military targets — Reuters, July 12, 2026

Khamenei's body lies in state in Tehran for a week of funeral events — Reuters, July 3, 2026

Iran continues work at key nuclear site, violating U.S.-Iran agreement — Foundation for Defense of Democracies, July 8, 2026

Secondary sources

Timeline of the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis — Wikipedia

Huge crowds in Mashhad for burial of Iran's supreme leader — BBC, July 9, 2026

Iran attacks Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar after U.S. strikes — The National, July 9, 2026