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A general view of the giant banner hung Enghelab Square that reads, “The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed; the entire Persian Gulf is our hunting ground.” as daily life continues in Tehran, Iran on April 05, 2026. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]
The naval command of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the Strait of Hormuz will never return to its previous state, particularly for the United States and Israel.
In a statement posted on its account on the X platform, the naval command said its forces are completing operational preparations to implement a plan approved by Iranian officials, aimed at establishing what it described as a new order in the Gulf, according to the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik.
Earlier, Seyed Mehdi Tabatabaei, deputy head of the Iranian president’s office for communications and media, said that US President Donald Trump had “recklessly ignited a full-scale war in the region and continues to boast about it.”
He added on his account on X on Sunday that Trump had resorted to insults and “nonsense out of desperation and intense anger”.
Tabatabaei also said that fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz would be conditional on compensation for all damages caused by what he described as the imposed war, noting that this would be carried out under a new legal system partly based on transit revenues.
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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
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Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. [Dursun Aydemir – Anadolu Agency]
Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton said on Monday that Iran holds the keys to war and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz depends on its will, despite ongoing threats from US President Donald Trump, Anadolu Agency reports.
“Those who hold the keys are the Iranians, whether we like it or not,” Breton told French broadcaster BFM TV.
Stressing that Tehran is in a position of strength, he noted that Iranians organized themselves and were not alone in the war with China supplying components and expertise.
Breton said Iran “has entered an asymmetric war” with “the best army in the world,” but warned that US reserves are dwindling.
“Since the start of hostilities, the equivalent of two years’ production of Patriot missile system has been used up. The Pentagon is starting to worry,” he added.
Highlighting that Tehran has been preparing for this for 40 years, Breton further stressed that Trump is “under pressure, particularly from voters.”
The region has been on alert since the US and Israel launched a joint offensive on Iran on Feb. 28, killing more than 1,400 people to date, including then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting Israel as well as Jordan, Iraq and Gulf countries hosting US military assets. It has also restricted the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
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Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei holds a press conference at the ministry building in Tehran, Iran on August 18, 2025. [Ahmet Dursun – Anadolu Agency]
Iran said Monday it is seeking an “end to the imposed war” rather than a ceasefire with the US, rejecting proposals for a temporary truce and insisting on “guarantees” to prevent renewed war, Anadolu Agency reports.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said during a press briefing in Tehran that any pause in fighting would risk allowing Iran’s adversaries to regroup.
“A deadline must not cause us to have even the slightest hesitation in defending our country,” he said.
“A ceasefire means creating a short pause to allow the other side to rebuild its forces and commit crimes again. No rational person would accept such a course of action,” he added.
Baqaei said Iran’s position is to end the conflict entirely, with assurances that it will not resume.
“Our demand is the end of the imposed war, accompanied by guarantees that this vicious cycle will not be repeated,” he said.
He added that such guarantees would have to come through deterrence.
“The guarantee is precisely this: that the enemy must be made to regret its actions in such a way that it no longer has the courage or audacity to act against Iran’s sovereignty,” he said.
Baqaei expressed skepticism about international institutions, saying there are no reliable external guarantees.
“There is no legal or international guarantee. Unfortunately, the United Nations has shown in most cases that it becomes a tool in the hands of the United States and certain powers,” he said.
The spokesperson said Iran must instead ensure its own security through its actions.
“On a matter related to national security and Iran’s sovereignty, we must act in a way that we ourselves can establish a firm and reliable guarantee for our national security,” he said.
Regional tensions have escalated since the US and Israel launched a joint offensive on Iran on Feb. 28, killing so far over 1,340 people, including then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting Israel, along with Jordan, Iraq, and Gulf countries hosting US military assets, causing casualties and damage to infrastructure while disrupting global markets and aviation.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
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Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise. [Photo by Steve Sharp on Unsplash]
Greenpeace on Monday announced that it will join the upcoming humanitarian Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza – an effort to break the years-long blockade of the Palestinian enclave – contributing a vessel to provide technical and operational support, Anadolu reports.
The environmental group said its ship, the Arctic Sunrise, which measures 50.5 meters (166 feet) and can carry up to 30 people, will take part in the mission.
“Greenpeace’s history of defending the seas, confronting injustice and taking action in defence of life makes them a powerful addition to our 2026 spring mission,” said Susan Abdullah, member of the Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee, in a statement. “We sail together in the same direction, with a shared determination to help break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.”
The flotilla is set to sail from Barcelona, Spain on Sunday, April 12, with a public solidarity gathering planned for April 11.
“While world governments have lacked the courage and conviction to uphold international law and their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, the Sumud Flotilla has been a shining light of humanitarian solidarity and a symbol of hope in action,” said Eva Saldana, the executive director of Greenpeace Spain.
Last September, the flotilla set sail from Spain, and eventually included 43 boats and 462 people. Before it could reach Gaza, Israeli forces boarded the vessels and took the participants into custody, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.
Organizers say this year’s flotilla will be the largest mission yet, including more than 1,000 participants and 100 vessels in parallel with land mobilizations.
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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
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The United States announces that the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, carrying 3,500 U.S. troops, has reached the area of responsibility of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East on March 2026. [US CENTCOM/Handout – Anadolu Agency]
Washington has a favourite word for moments like this: options. It sounds sober. Responsible, even. It suggests prudence, flexibility, a commander-in-chief keeping every door open. But in practice, “options” is often just the polite way this town avoids saying what it is really doing. It is preparing itself, step by step, to go further than it said it would.
That is what makes the talk around Iran so unsettling. The administration keeps insisting that it does not need a ground war. Senior officials have said the United States can achieve its aims in Iran without ground troops, even as thousands more U.S. forces are being moved into the region to preserve “maximum optionality.” Read that sentence twice. If ground troops are unnecessary, why is Washington still so determined to keep the idea alive?
Americans know where this language usually leads. First, the war is limited. Then the deployment is precautionary. Then the mission expands by degrees, never quite enough at any one moment to trigger a national reckoning, but enough in aggregate to wake up one morning and realise the country is in another war it was told it would not have to fight.
That is not cynicism. It is memory.
One month into this conflict, even sympathetic observers would struggle to say with confidence what success is supposed to look like. The White House now appears to face only hard choices: escalate further, possibly even on the ground, or try to negotiate an exit from a war whose aims have become harder to define the longer it has gone on. That is often how trouble announces itself in Washington—not with one catastrophic decision, but with a series of smaller ones made in the fog of wanting not to look weak.
And whatever this war is, it is not cost-free. That much is already obvious at home. The Strait of Hormuz is one of those places Americans only hear about in a crisis, but they pay for it almost immediately. In 2024, roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day moved through the strait—about one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption—and there are very few practical alternatives if traffic is badly disrupted. In plain English: when that waterway is in trouble, so are gas prices, shipping costs, and household budgets.
That is no abstraction now. Public approval for this war is weak. Polling shows broad disapproval of the strikes on Iran, with a clear majority of Americans also opposed to deploying US ground troops there.
Those numbers matter not because public opinion should dictate strategy minute by minute, but because they show something important: the country is not in the mood for another war sold in the language of control and finished in the language of sacrifice.
There is also a basic military question that should be asked more often and answered more honestly. If Iranian retaliation has already shown that American forces and facilities in the region are vulnerable, what exactly is the theory behind putting more Americans within range? A ground war is not just “more pressure.” It is more funerals. More catastrophic injuries. More families being told that the mission changed after the mission had supposedly already been defined. It is one thing to posture about resolve in a briefing room. It is another thing to ask young Americans to bear the cost of that posture with their bodies.
Some advocates of escalation seem to think the mere possibility of a ground operation strengthens Washington’s hand. Maybe, in a narrow tactical sense, it does.
But wars are not played on whiteboards. They are lived in real time, by real people, and they have a way of refusing the tidy logic that got them started. If the United States crosses from air and naval pressure into a land war, the result will not be a cleaner version of this crisis. It will be a different crisis altogether—larger, bloodier, and much harder to contain.
America’s allies seem to understand that. European officials have made clear, in public and in diplomatic language, that they see the United States as increasingly unpredictable and insufficiently clear about where this war is headed. Calls for restraint, for protecting civilians, and for restoring safe navigation through Hormuz are not diplomatic noise. They are signals of deep unease. The war already looks wider, messier, and more economically dangerous than Washington’s original rhetoric suggested.
Trump, of all people, should understand the political trap here. He returned to power promising not to repeat the old bipartisan habit of turning the Middle East into a graveyard of American credibility, money, and lives. A ground war with Iran would do exactly that. It would not look like strength. It would look like Washington falling back into its oldest reflex: when the first use of force fails to produce clarity, answer with more force and pretend clarity is right around the corner.
It rarely is.
There is still time to avoid the worst version of this. But avoiding it requires a little more than saying “no plans at this time.” It requires shutting the door on a ground invasion, not theatrically, not temporarily, but decisively. It requires admitting that a policy can be costly even before it becomes catastrophic. And it requires remembering that the most dangerous wars are often the ones launched by leaders who insist, all the way through, that they remain in control.
America does not need another war of drift. It does not need another “limited” mission that expands because nobody in power wants to be the first to say enough. And it certainly does not need to send more Americans into a conflict whose boundaries are already harder to see than its costs.
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Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
