The war between Iran and the United States is entering a phase of high tension once again. After weeks in which indirect contacts kept a diplomatic channel open, Washington has rejected Tehran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran is hardening its military rhetoric and warning that it is prepared for a new American offensive.

There is a strait south of the Red Sea that helps explain why the Houthis have ceased to be just an actor in the Yemen war: Bab el-Mandeb, the maritime passage that connects the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea and through which 12% of global trade passes. In recent weeks, the group, aligned with Iran, has advanced along the western coast of Yemen and has consolidated positions at strategic points in the strait. At the same time, has resumed attacks against Saudi Arabia and has announced a blockade against ships linked to the kingdom.Now, the Houthis have a position that allows them to threaten one of the main maritime routes between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. And they do so while the war between Iran and the United States has turned the Strait of Hormuz into the other major focus of maritime tension in the region.“The Houthis have a real capacity for pressure. They cannot indefinitely close traffic through the Red Sea, but they can certainly increase costs, generate uncertainty, and periodically interrupt commercial and energy flows,” explains Neil Quilliam to ARA, a researcher at the Middle East and North Africa program at the international analysis center Chatham House. According to the expert, they do not need to close the strait: it is enough for them to increase the risk.If sailing through the Red Sea is too expensive or unsafe, companies can divert ships around the Cape of Good Hope, on the Atlantic coast of South Africa, with more days of navigation and higher costs. Thus, Tehran and its allies can exert pressure from two different points on two key routes for global trade and energy.The Houthis, who officially call themselves Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), are part of the so-called "axis of resistance," the network of armed and political actors linked to Iran, and they receive military and technological support from Tehran. A 2024 UN report documents transfers of military material, assistance, and training linked to Iran and other actors in the axis to the Zaydi Shia group. Although Iran denies supplying weapons to the group and claims its support is only political, the Houthis have gone from being a local militia in northern Yemen to possessing about 350,000 fighters and a significant arsenal of missiles, drones, and anti-ship weapons.The role of the Houthis in the US-Iran confrontation

Various reports from the analysis centers Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chatham House point out that the Houthis can now act as a negotiation instrument for Iran before Washington, in a war that has already been going on for seven months. But this does not mean that Tehran controls the group's decisions. The movement has a command structure, territorial interests, and its own political agenda. Control of the coast, in fact, responds to its own interests: it gives them more capacity to pressure Saudi Arabia, strengthens their position ahead of future negotiations regarding Yemen, and expands their control over the oil and gas in the areas they dominate.

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The United Nations was created by the San Francisco Charter in 1945 with the goal that the international community would have a forum to discuss global security issues without having to resort to armed conflict. The idea was not to repeat the mistakes of the interwar League of Nations and to have a truly representative body where all countries, however small, could have a voice and a vote to preserve the most precious good, peace. Surely, the creation of the Security Council with five permanent members, and therefore with veto power, already perverted the initial objective and has turned the UN into an inoperative entity, but what had never been seen before is the spectacle offered on Tuesday by Donald Trump threatening Iran with annihilation from the speakers' rostrum. This Wednesday, the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, appeared to show defiance and warn that "they have tested the strength and firmness of Iran, and they have learned that they cannot make Iran surrender".

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The UN concludes that the United States committed war crimes in Iran on February 28, the day Washington and Tel Aviv launched the offensive that initiated the war against the ayatollahs. The United Nations mission for the Persian country points to two air strikes to support its accusation: the one that took place against a school in Minab, in the south of the country, in which 120 children died, and a precision missile attack that killed 22 civilians in a sports complex and a residential area in Lamerd, also in the south.

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“They riddled the car with bullets. I told the children to hide under the seats”: this is how Zeinab Molaierad remembers the death of her 9-year-old son, Kian Pirfalak, in September 2022. The family was returning home to the Iranian city of Izeh when plainclothes officers opened fire on the vehicle. The authorities attributed the deaths that evening to a terrorist attack. It is one of the hundreds of cases collected in the Amnesty International report Architects of Atrocities, a thousand-page investigation published this Wednesday, coinciding with the second anniversary of the murder of the young Mahsa Gina Amini, arrested by the morality police for not wearing her veil in accordance with their strict rules. A death that triggered a historic protest movement drowned in blood by the regime of the ayatollahs.

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The United States military attacked three Iranian oil tankers this Saturday, according to the Central Command (Centcom) in a statement, in which it justified the action as a response to attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard against two US warships patrolling in the region's waters. This episode of cross-attacks represents an escalation of the conflict, which remains deadlocked after more than half a year.

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Iran has denounced that the United States allegedly committed "war crimes" after one of its missiles killed four people early this morning at a wedding being held in the south of the country. The Islamic Republic has also counted at least 68 injured following the crossfire that the Revolutionary Guard and US forces engaged in on Tuesday in a resumption of hostilities in the region.

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Crossfire reignites in the Middle East after a month of relative calm. US President Donald Trump has promised that the military will respond to the missiles that Iran launched early this morning against two US bases in Jordan. "We will hit them hard," the Republican said in statements to Fox, where he confirmed that US forces intercepted six Iranian missiles. The Islamic Republic had opened fire early this morning against the US's Arab ally in retaliation for the US attack on Sunday against two Iranian platforms on the island of Larak, located near the Strait of Hormuz. In a statement released by the Iranian agencies Fars and Tasmin, the main military arm of the Islamic Republic specified that the attack was carried out with drones and left several dead and injured, although it did not specify how many.

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Donald Trump continues trapped in the Iran labyrinth, a war with no exit that was supposed to last, at most, six weeks, and which has already been going on for six months. An excess of confidence in the whispered words of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, led the US president to disregard his advisors' warnings. The conflict has no end in sight. And above all, it has no good outcome for the interests of the United States, even though the president has decided to virtually annex the strait, as can be seen in one of his latest communications on Truth Social. Under the title "Territories of the United States", on Friday morning he tweeted that Hormuz is now another of Washington's domains.

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For more than twenty years, the pipeline connecting Kirkuk in northern Iraq and Banias in Syria has been out of service. Built in 1952, it used to transport 300,000 barrels of oil daily, but it stopped working after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now it has regained new prominence. The crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has reopened interest in recovering a route that allows Iraq to export its oil to the Mediterranean without depending exclusively on the Gulf.

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If I were writing a book about the United States' war with Iran, I would know exactly what the title would be. It would be the publication Donald Trump made on social media on April 5, 2026, addressed to the leaders of Iran: “Open the [expletive] strait, you crazy motherfuckers, or you'll live in hell… BEWARE!”

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Sixty days. This was the deadline that the United States and Iran gave themselves to transform the memorandum of understanding signed in June into a final agreement. The deadline expires this Monday without this agreement having been reached. And during these two months, the understanding that was supposed to contain the war has been on the verge of causing it to explode again. In fact, in the last few hours Tehran has raised its tone again: a high-ranking commander of the Revolutionary Guard has warned that its defensive stance will become "offensive" and has threatened with "strategic surprises" against the enemy.

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New grandiloquent promise from the President of the United States. Donald Trump has assured in the last few hours that he plans to declare the Strait of Hormuz as "United States territory" once the American army has fulfilled its mission to "defeat Iran". The leader assured this at a rally in New York, and quickly received a response from Tehran: "The Strait of Hormuz cannot be conquered with a tweet or with aircraft carriers, nor by issuing an order or with an electoral speech," wrote Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, on X.

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Iran tries to project stability as doubts grow about the health status of Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader of the country after the death of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the first American and Israeli attacks against the country on February 28. Suspicions have resurfaced after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian admitted that communication with the country's leader is currently "very difficult".The statements, made in an interview broadcast by Iranian state television, have further fueled speculation about the physical condition of Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, who has not appeared publicly since taking office. The new leader has so far only communicated through written messages and did not appear at his father's funeral ceremonies last July.“It is very difficult to communicate with him at the moment, but, in any case, his presence is a great source of strength for us to continue,” stated Pezeshkian, without offering further details on what exactly this difficulty of interaction means. The Iranian president, however, took the opportunity to reject versions describing Khamenei as a weakened figure and assured that the meetings they have held have been “productive” and marked by “great kindness and very solid logic.”According to information published in March by the American newspaper The New York Times, the new supreme leader was reportedly seriously injured in the American and Israeli attack that killed his father. At that time, several media outlets reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was in good mental condition, but had suffered significant burns to his face and lips. He also reportedly underwent an operation on one of his hands and required plastic facial surgery, while awaiting a prosthesis for a leg. Iranian sources have assured that he only suffered a minor injury, but the Iranian regime has not released any video or audio recording of the religious leader. This week, the Iranian newspaper Al-Mashhari has assured that the decision not to release recordings of the supreme leader is due to security reasons. According to this newspaper, an audio or video could reveal his location and give clues about his physical condition.Tension within the regime

The statements by the president of Iran come at a time of tension within Iranian power structures. The Iranian media outlet Tabnak has reported that Khamenei would have warned Pezeshkian that he would accept his resignation if the president presented it again. This episode revisits doubts about the relationship between the presidency and the most influential centers of power in the Islamic Republic. After months of tensions between the government and the military and security apparatuses of the Islamic Republic, in May, Pezeshkian had already considered resigning because he felt he could not fully exercise his constitutional responsibilities.Several Iranian media outlets reported that the president had sent a letter to the supreme leader's office denouncing that the government had been sidelined from the state's main decisions and that the power vacuum had allowed the harder factions of the Revolutionary Guard to progressively take control of strategic issues. Both the Tasnim agency, linked to the Revolutionary Guard, and the Deputy Director of Communication and Information of the Presidency Office, Seyed Mehdi Tabatabaei, denied this information and assured that Pezeshkian would continue to exercise his duties normally.The uncertainty about the country's leader's condition has also begun to spread to Iranian society. During the days of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's funeral, several citizens consulted by Reuters expressed their concern about the prolonged public absence of the new supreme leader. Some warned that this situation could increase political uncertainty in the country, while others insisted that people needed to see that there was a leader running the country.All this comes at a time when Tehran is in full negotiation with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian Foreign Ministry assures that the talks with Oman to establish new maritime traffic routes through the Strait of Hormuz are “about to conclude”. Since the resumption of attacks between the United States and Iran on June 17, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been drastically reduced. This Wednesday only two ships crossed this route, according to maritime traffic monitoring data compiled by the company Kpler, compared to eight the previous day. Before the war that began on February 28, an average of 130 to 140 ships passed through it daily.

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Negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are advancing, although the final details remain unsettled. Iran and Oman have moved closer on a new maritime route to re-establish transit through this strategic passage, while Washington and Tehran maintain indirect contact to resolve the political obstacles that still block a definitive reopening.

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In Washington, the summer heat is unavoidable, but Donald Trump and the Iranian regime are once again repeating the loop of crossed statements from last spring. The only difference is that this back and forth is happening in a post-ceasefire scenario and where Tehran seems to have already gauged the US president. This Monday morning, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Esmaeil Baghaei, said that his country is not holding talks with the US, thus contradicting the announcement Trump had made on Sunday evening aboard Air Force One.

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After a brief pause in which it seemed that calm could begin to settle in the Middle East, hostilities have returned with force. The region continues to be immersed in an escalation that threatens to further broaden the conflict and drag new actors into a crisis already marked by high military tension.

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A terribly familiar war rhythm has returned to prevail in Iran: bombed highways, a sinking currency, threatening messages from President Trump on social media, and incendiary rhetoric from religious leaders of the Iranian regime. But when Behnam, an unemployed musician from Tehran, calls relatives or friends to see how they are, he never starts by talking about the war. "The first question we ask each other is: have you eaten?"

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The Houthis have once again opened a new front in the war between the United States and Iran. The Yemeni group has claimed a missile and drone attack against two Saudi oil tankers sailing in the Red Sea, in compliance with the threat issued days earlier to impose a maritime blockade against ships linked to Saudi Arabia crossing the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The attack has caused several oil tankers to alter their route, shipping companies to review their plans, and increased concern about a new disruption of world trade on one of the planet's most strategic maritime routes.

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Jordan has ceased to be a secondary theater of war. After last Friday's attack on a military position in the northeast of the country, in which several American soldiers died, Iran attacked Jordanian territory again this Tuesday. Tehran assured that it had reached the Rukban area, near the borders with Syria and Iraq, and that it had caused new casualties among the American troops deployed there, information that Washington has not confirmed. Beyond the victim count, the succession of attacks reveals a fundamental change: the Hashemite kingdom, for decades one of the most discreet allies of the United States in the Middle East, has moved to occupy a central place in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran.

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