Iran has put the energy markets in check by turning on the fan of chaos, while continuing to respond to the attacks of Israel and the United States despite its obvious military inferiority. Almost two weeks after the start of the US and Israeli military offensive, on February 28, several attacks attributed to Iran have already hit six ships in the Persian Gulf, three of them this Thursday: and the third a container ship in the waters of the United Arab Emirates. These three ships join the three cargo ships attacked on Wednesday. This escalation occurred on the same day that the first message from the new Iranian supreme leader since his appointment last Sunday was released. Mojtaba Khamenei (the victims of the war) and assured that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz must continue “as a tool to pressure the enemy.”
The speech of the new president, 56 years old, has been defiant and his tone that of closing ranks. He has not transmitted the message directly nor have the Iranians, not even in a video. A presenter on the official Iranian television has read his words with a photograph of him with the country’s tricolor flag as a background. This circumstance could fuel the rumors about his state of health that have spread in recent days. An official Iranian source confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday that the new supreme leader was “slightly” wounded in the bombing that killed his father on the first day of the war.
Khamenei has called for unity and made other threats, such as that his country will attack “all US bases” in the region, which “must be closed immediately.” The leader has then urged his neighbors to “clarify” their position on those he has defined as “the murderers of our people”, in reference to the United States and Israel. He has mentioned, for example, the attack attributed to Washington against a primary school in Minab, where 175 people died, most of them girls between 7 and 12 years old. He has also alluded to the “martyrdom” of his father, whose memory he has honored.
Khamenei then added that his country is studying “the opening of other fronts” of the war – he has not specified which ones – “in which the enemy has little experience and will be extremely vulnerable, and their activation will occur if the war continues.”
The supreme leader’s message has confirmed that his country will continue with its strategy of spreading chaos in its region and even globally and accompanying the conventional war with a hybrid and commercial war by interrupting traffic through the Hormuz sea route, through which 20% of the world’s oil transits, among other raw materials.
The new attacks against ships this day have once again raised the cost of a barrel of crude oil above the psychological barrier of $100. The first bombings had forced Donald Trump, the day before, to withdraw reserves of that hydrocarbon, the same day that thirty countries that are part of the IEA agreed to put it on the markets.
On the other hand, the Iranian regime has responded to the “large-scale” bombings announced by Israel – explosions have been reported in Tehran, Isfahan (center), Saqqez (Iranian Kurdistan) and other locations – with new attacks in Israeli territory and against neighboring countries in the Middle East. Tehran has also coordinated with its Lebanese ally, the Shiite militia party Hezbollah, to launch an unprecedented attack with 200 projectiles, according to Israeli media, against northern Israel.
Several drones have also hit a building and the Kuwait international airport, a building in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, as well as fuel tanks near the capital of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In the last 24 hours, the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan has itself been hit by 40 drones and missiles, according to Rudaw, the main regional television. One of those projectiles in that Iraqi region, as reported by the Italian Defense Minister, Guido Crosetto, who has been convinced that the attack was “deliberate.”
About 2,000 people, according to official data from the different countries involved. Of them, more than 1,200 (many civilians) in Iran, followed by Lebanon, with more than 600 dead in Israeli attacks. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has reported that, after 13 days of conflict, there are more than 3.2 million internally displaced people in Iran, a fact that fuels the fear of neighboring countries such as Turkey of a massive wave of refugees.
No visible exit
The regional instability, the human drama and the alteration of the energy markets, as well as the military resistance that the Iranian regime is presenting, do not support the statements of the president of the United States. On Wednesday, Donald Trump first told the portal Axios that the war would end “soon” before claiming to have “won” in that conflict, in a kind of pre-campaign rally he gave in Kentucky, with his eyes set on the crucial midterm elections in the United States that will be held in November.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz significantly complicates these plans, warns Michael Young, an analyst at the Middle East Carnegie Center think tank. “Those who pushed for this war, in Jerusalem and Washington, are realizing that they have gotten themselves into a major mess,” this expert emphasizes in a message broadcast on X.
If the facts on the ground do not seem to match Trump’s triumphalism, neither do the US intelligence services themselves support his apparent enthusiasm, as they believe that the Iranian regime is not faltering despite the 13 days that the bombings have lasted. Neither the death of Khamenei, nor those of other regime leaders, nor the numerous military targets hit have pushed the Islamic Republic into the abyss for the moment.
This is indicated by a “multitude” of US intelligence reports, cited this Thursday by Reuters, which assure that the Iranian political system is not at risk of collapsing. They add that the Iranian authorities “maintain control” over that population that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump himself have called to rise up against their political system.
Three objectives
In addition to the purpose of overthrowing the regime, on which Trump has contradicted himself several times – but not Israel – Washington defined three major objectives for its military campaign. However, Thursday the newspaper The New York Timeswhich quotes Trump advisers, did so without anticipating that Tehran would wage economic war by shutting down if the country was attacked, something Tehran had constantly threatened to do.
The first of these objectives was to completely dismantle the Iranian nuclear program, which, on the other hand, the president of the United States had already declared “annihilated” after the 12 days of bombing in June 2025. This with the idea of preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, a purpose that Iran has always denied.
The second objective was to end Iran’s missile capabilities; and the third, definitively bury the network of alliances of the Islamic Republic with regional militias in the Middle East—especially Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
None of those objectives have been fully achieved at the moment.
Israel claimed this Thursday to have attacked the Taleqan nuclear facilities, in the Parchin complex, about 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran. Satellite images revealed by show three holes in those facilities, compatible with those caused by the GBU-57, the bunker-busting bombs that only the United States has. Washington already used this weapon during the June bombings of other nuclear facilities such as Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow.
Israel and the United States “can destroy the facilities, but everything can be rebuilt,” military analyst Jesús Pérez Triana indicates in WhatsApp messages. The “will and technological knowledge” that hundreds of Iranian nuclear scientists possess are “intangible issues that can hardly be eliminated with bombing.” For this analyst “the only way to ensure that Iran does not achieve the atomic bomb is an international agreement in which there are rigorous inspections” of the nuclear program.
After Iran has been attacked for the second time while negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States, Iranian leaders may conclude that the only way to avoid further US and Israeli bombing is to arm themselves with atomic weapons.
Regarding missiles, analysts believe that the United States and, above all, Israel have significantly degraded this military capacity, but have not put an end to it. Iran continues to launch these projectiles, although in smaller numbers, and also hundreds of drones.
Even less has the goal of definitively burying the Axis of Resistance, Iran’s network of regional alliances, been achieved. This new contest seems to have even reactivated that collaboration, previously in low hours. Israeli media have reported that Iran and Hezbollah fired 200 rockets at northern Israel on Wednesday night, in an unprecedented joint operation. In a new demonstration that the regional fire caused by this war is only spreading, the Israeli Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, threatened this Thursday with the forcible seizure of Lebanese territory if Hezbollah continues attacking his country.
In this context, the Islamic Republic has an advantage: its objectives are more modest than Trump’s. The Islamic regime “is enough to survive,” says Luciano Zaccara, a professor at Georgetown University in that Arab country, from Qatar. The United States and Israel, however, aspire to achieve the aforementioned objectives to proclaim a total victory in this war.
Right now, former Israeli military intelligence analyst for Iran Danny Citrinowizc also points out in X, Israel and the United States only have bad options before them. The first option is to end the war and leave behind “a more radicalized regime” in Iran. This is what the call for “revenge” this Thursday of its new leader points to. The other possibility is to bet on an “escalation” of the conflict that will in turn provoke an even harsher Iranian response. And that without the guarantee of ending the Islamic Republic.
