Iran seized two ships in the Strait of Hormuz as it tightened its grip on the strategic waterway after US President Donald Trump announced he was indefinitely calling off attacks, with no sign of peace talks restarting.
The status of a two-week-old ceasefire, due to have expired earlier this week, remained unclear.
In a sharp about-face hours after threatening renewed violence, Trump made what appeared to be a unilateral announcement on Tuesday that the US would extend a ceasefire until it had discussed an Iranian proposal in peace talks to end the two-month-old war.
But Iranian officials did not say they had agreed to any extension of the truce, and criticised Trump’s decision to maintain the US Navy blockade of Iran’s trade by sea, itself considered by Iran an act of war. Iran’s parliament speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said a full ceasefire only made sense if the blockade was lifted.
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the slender chokepoint that carried a fifth of the world’s oil trade before the war, was impossible with such a “flagrant breach of the ceasefire,” Qalibaf said on social media.
“You did not achieve your goals through military aggression and you will not achieve them by bullying either,” he wrote in his first response to Trump’s announcement.
“The only way is recognising the Iranian people’s rights.”
In another wartime shakeup at the Pentagon, Navy Secretary john Phelan has been fired, a US official and a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
The move came just weeks after Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ousted the Army’s top general.
The Pentagon said Phelan was leaving the administration “effective immediately,” but did not provide a reason or say whether it was his decision to go.
Trump has again backed away from his repeated threats to bomb Iran’s power plants and other civilian infrastructure, which the United Nations and others warn would violate international humanitarian law.
But little progress has been made in ending the war that started with joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28.
That leaves the two sides in a holding pattern with the crucial Strait of Hormuz still effectively shut, straining economies across the world.
Thousands of people have been killed across the Middle East, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, where the Iran-allied Hezbollah militant group joined the fighting against Israel.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized two vessels and escorted them to Iranian shores, according to statements by the shipping companies and Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.
The Revolutionary Guards accused the ships it has seized, the Liberia-flagged Epaminondas and Panama-flagged MSC Francesca, of operating without required permits and tampering with their navigation systems.
A third, Liberia-flagged container ship was fired upon in the same area but was not damaged and had resumed sailing, according to maritime security sources.
Leavitt said in an interview with Fox News that since the ships were not US or Israeli vessels the seizure was not a violation of the ceasefire. She called it an act of “piracy”.
The US military said on Wednesday it had so far directed more than 30 ships to turn around or return to port as part of the US blockade against Iran.
Far beyond the Gulf, the US military has intercepted at least three Iranian-flagged tankers in Asian waters, sources said, redirecting them away from their positions near India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Brent, the international crude oil benchmark, remained above $100 a barrel in Asian trade on Thursday, having hit triple figures a day earlier for the first time in two weeks.
