Iran attacks U.S. military bases in Kuwait as regional fighting resumes

Kuwait's army said Thursday that it was intercepting missiles and drones launched from Iran. Iranian state television separately confirmed that Tehran was targeting U.S. bases in Kuwait, presenting the attack as a response to U.S. actions against the Iranian people. Those official statements identify both the immediate target and the governments' stated descriptions of the strike, without establishing an independently assessed account of damage at the bases.

The renewed round of fighting followed U.S. strikes on Iranian targets on Sunday, the first known American attacks in several weeks. Washington said those strikes were intended to stop Iran from placing sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz. That stated objective places the latest military exchanges alongside the continuing contest over access to the strategic shipping route rather than describing Sunday's operation as an isolated attack.

Iran said the Sunday strikes caused casualties and that it responded by targeting U.S. troops in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Tehran did not provide a number for the casualties in that statement. Both the casualty assertion and the description of the subsequent targets came from Iran, preserving the attribution and the uncertainty around the scale of the harm it claimed.

The United States has also threatened wider economic pressure beyond the current military action. Washington said it would target Iran's economy by imposing sanctions on its trade partners. The threat is a declared policy direction and does not mean that every contemplated sanction has taken effect; its described focus is on Iran's commercial relationships outside the immediate battlefield.

The Iranian Red Crescent said missile shrapnel at the coastal town of Kuhestak killed four people, including a child, and wounded more than 50. The figures are the organization's stated toll for that location. The deaths and injuries concern the strike at Kuhestak and should not be treated as a total for the broader conflict, which includes military action at other locations.

A fragile ceasefire had already collapsed after unclaimed attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Before the disruption, the route carried one-fifth of global oil supplies. That measure describes the strait's prior share of oil flows and explains the scale of the shipping corridor involved, without asserting a quantified current effect on energy prices or the volume of oil now moving through the waterway.