Bahrain said it had been targeted by Iranian drones and a ship in the Strait of Hormuz was struck on Saturday, adding fresh tension to the detente established in the wake of an interim US-Iran peace deal signed earlier this month.
Bahrain’s foreign ministry said a number of Iranian drones targeted the country, home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, early on Saturday morning, state-run BNA reported. Tehran has repeatedly targeted it and other Gulf states that host American military bases and thousands of troops since the US and Israel launched the war in late February.
Meanwhile, a UK naval group on Saturday said a tanker was struck by an unidentified projectile in the Strait of Hormuz, though vessel-tracking data showed that multiple ships continued to transit the waterway on Saturday morning.
Iran claimed on Saturday that it had targeted US sites in the Gulf following US strikes on its missile storage and radar installations on Friday. Those were in response to an Iranian drone hit on a container ship in Hormuz that sparked off the fresh round of attacks on Thursday. An unnamed US official told CNN after the US strikes that the action did not constitute a return to major combat operations for now.
The back-and-forth extended fighting around the waterway entered a third day and risks slowing progress towards restoring shipping traffic in Hormuz to pre-war levels.
The Joint Maritime Information Centre on Saturday raised the security threat in Hormuz to “substantial” following the attacks on merchant vessels, and published a warning area for potential mines spanning much of the usual transit route. It also said that the Omani route recommended by Western navies had been expanded to allow ships to transit in both directions simultaneously.
