JERUSALEM — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Saturday that the Strait of Hormuz was closed until the United States ended its own naval blockade, just a day after both countries announced that the vital waterway had reopened.
Two Indian-flagged ships were hit by fire, at least one of them from Iranian forces, according to a shipping monitor. The new developments added to the confusion over the status of transit through the strait and could dampen hopes for a quick end to the war.
On Friday, Iran’s foreign minister called the strait “completely open,” leading President Donald Trump to declare a major breakthrough in the negotiations between the two countries on a permanent ceasefire. At the same time, Trump said the United States would maintain its blockade of ships traveling from Iranian ports. His statement appeared to anger the Iranians, who had expected the United States to reciprocate by ending its blockade.
Trump imposed the blockade on Monday after the countries failed to reach any agreement after a marathon bargaining session in Pakistan last weekend. The two countries are abiding by a ceasefire set to expire Tuesday.
Iran has choked global energy supplies by menacing passing ships during more than a month of war with the United States and Israel. The throttling of oil tanker traffic had sent oil prices soaring, and they dropped after Iran’s announcement on Friday that the strait was reopened.
Trump on Saturday continued to project optimism about the prospect of a deal, despite Iran’s closure of the strait again. “They got a little cute, as they have been doing for 47 years,” he told reporters in the Oval Office after signing an executive order on an unrelated matter. The peace talks, he maintained, were “going actually along very well, and we’ll see.”
The strikes on Indian-flagged ships did not appear to cause any casualties, but they inflamed tensions between India and Iran. In a statement on Saturday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that it had summoned Iran’s ambassador and “conveyed India’s deep concern at the shooting incident earlier today involving two Indian-flagged ships in the Strait of Hormuz.”
In one of the incidents, gun ships operated by the Guard, a force separate from Iran’s regular military, fired at a tanker without radio warning, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a monitoring organization administered by Britain’s Royal Navy.
In the second incident, a container ship was “hit by an unknown projectile which caused damage to some of the containers,” the organization said. Those ships, and several others, then reversed course.
In Lebanon, a 10-day ceasefire that went into effect on Friday appeared to hold Saturday, though Israel’s military said it continued to strike what it said were militants who approached Israeli military lines, saying they were in violation of the truce.
Israel has also continued to occupy parts of southern Lebanon and demolish buildings close to the border, in villages where it says that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, has historically entrenched itself.
Elsewhere in southern Lebanon, a United Nations peacekeeper was killed and three others were injured on Saturday after a patrol came under attack from “nonstate actors,” the peacekeeping force, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said in a statement. President Emmanuel Macron of France identified the dead peacekeeper as Florian Montorio, a French national, and suggested in a statement that Hezbollah was responsible. President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon condemned the latest attack and attributed it to unidentified “gunmen” during a call with Macron on Saturday, according to a statement. Hezbollah denied any involvement.
There has been a string of attacks against UNIFIL during the war. Three U.N. peacekeepers were killed last month, including one by Israeli tank fire, according to a preliminary U.N. investigation.
The turnabout in the Strait of Hormuz followed a day in which Trump seemingly conducted negotiations via the news media and social media. In a burst of dizzying messages and interviews, he said that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ship traffic would continue, but also that he expected a deal “in the next day or two” and that Iran had “agreed to everything.”
Trump said that Iran had agreed to suspend its nuclear program indefinitely, that it would let the United States retrieve its nuclear material and that it would not receive any frozen assets from the United States.
The president has often made overly optimistic claims about the war, which began in late February. No new face-to-face talks were announced as of Saturday morning, and Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly denied that Iran had agreed to any of its adversaries’ core demands.
Iran had demanded that Israel halt its fight against Hezbollah as a condition of reaching a broader peace deal. Trump and U.S. officials worked to make that happen, even as they denied they were trying to meet Iran’s conditions.
On Saturday, thousands of displaced Lebanese returned to the country’s devastated south for the second day in a row.
The country’s coastal highway was clogged with miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic as cars piled high with mattresses and personal belongings moved at a snail’s pace. Some people flashed peace signs from their car windows. Others paused to stretch their legs.
“I didn’t ask anyone to check on my house or send me pictures. I want to do that myself,” said Zakri Zakaria, 55, who stopped on Saturday to buy essentials as his family headed home to the southern town of Kfar Tebnit, which was heavily bombarded during the war.
“We are heading there not knowing what we will find — or what we might not,” he said.
People arriving back at their hometowns often found a wasteland. Twisted hulls of burned-out cars sat along roads next to stores and apartments that had been leveled. Villagers out on the streets were sweeping up shards of glass, repairing downed electricity lines and using fire hoses to clean debris off the pavement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said last week that Israeli forces would remain in what he called a “security strip” stretching more than 6 miles into Lebanese territory.
That will prevent many of the more than 1 million people displaced by the fighting from returning to their homes, prolonging a humanitarian crisis and potentially destabilizing the truce. Hezbollah has demanded that Israeli forces withdraw and had warned that it was keeping its “finger on the trigger.”
The Israeli strikes on Saturday added to confusion over the scope of Israel’s military operations under the ceasefire deal. Under its terms, Israel will “preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent or ongoing attacks,” according to the State Department.
But it will not carry out “offensive military operations,” the agreement says.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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