US Expands Iran Offensive with Port, Bridge Strikes

Tehran Fires Missiles Across Gulf

Report By Y-Trendz

Dubai/Washington, July 18, 2026 — The United States dramatically widened its air campaign against Iran overnight into Friday, striking key bridges, energy sites and a maritime control tower at a major

Iranian port, as the fragile ceasefire reached last month collapsed entirely and the region braced for what officials fear could become an all-out war. Tehran responded within hours by launching a fresh wave of missiles and drones at U.S.-allied nations across the Gulf, marking the seventh consecutive night of strikes in an escalating battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Bridges, Ports and Power Infrastructure Targeted

U.S. Central Command confirmed the expanded operation in a statement posted to social media, saying it had "launched a round of strikes against Iran at 3 p.m. ET today for the seventh consecutive night," with the strikes "designed to continue degrading Iranian military capabilities at the Commander in Chief's direction." The overnight raids concluded at dawn Friday and reportedly hit dozens of targets across southern Iran.

The most significant new development was the deliberate targeting of transport infrastructure. American strikes hit highway and railway bridges that link Bandar Abbas — Iran's principal port on the Strait of Hormuz — to Tehran and the interior of the country. While alternate routes reportedly remain open, the strikes appear intended to choke off the movement of both military materiel and civilian goods for Iran's roughly 90 million people, marking a significant shift from strikes on military and energy sites toward infrastructure that sustains everyday life.

Separately, U.S. warplanes struck the port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz itself but strategically important as a jointly Indian-Iranian-operated trade route serving landlocked Afghanistan. The strikes collapsed a maritime control tower at the port in what Iranian state media described as a third round of attacks on the facility, though officials there did not immediately confirm the tower's collapse. Iran's Energy Ministry also acknowledged for the first time that American strikes had damaged power infrastructure, asking residents in southern provinces to conserve electricity, according to the state-run ISNA news agency.

A Tehran city councilman, Mehdi Chamran, alluded days earlier to the scale of the damage to the power grid, telling journalists who asked about electrical outages to simply "look at how many power facilities they hit." Iranian officials say the broader campaign has killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds more, with additional casualties reported from Friday's strikes.

Iran Retaliates Across the Gulf

Tehran's response was swift and geographically broad. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it had launched missiles and drones at Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, while also claiming an attack on U.S. special forces at al-Tanf in Syria — a former American outpost from which troops withdrew earlier this year. Missiles were also fired at Qatar, a nation that has served as a key mediator in on-and-off ceasefire talks between Washington and Tehran, underscoring how the conflict is increasingly ensnaring countries that have tried to stay out of the fighting.

In Kuwait, Iranian strikes damaged a power and water desalination plant, a facility considered critical infrastructure in the small, desert nation that depends heavily on desalinated water for its population. The attacks represent an escalation beyond the military and energy targets that had characterized earlier rounds of Iranian retaliation, edging closer to strikes on civilian life-support systems in Gulf states that host American bases but are not themselves combatants in the conflict.

Ceasefire in Ruins, Hormuz Traffic Collapses

The current wave of hostilities has effectively erased a ceasefire memorandum signed between Washington and Tehran last month, which had briefly allowed oil prices and shipping traffic to stabilize. Maritime tracking data from the intelligence platform Windward shows the toll: only six vessels were tracked crossing the Strait of Hormuz between 6 p.m. GMT Thursday and 6 a.m. GMT Friday, compared with the 18 to 22 daily crossings recorded earlier in the month, and a fraction of the roughly 130 vessels that transited daily before the war began in February.

The Strait, through which about one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil trade and roughly 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas shipments normally pass, has been a flashpoint since Iran first declared it closed on July 12, following a U.S. strike that Tehran said was launched after Iranian forces attacked a merchant vessel that was later abandoned in flames by its crew. Oil markets have reacted sharply: Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed steadily through the renewed fighting, undoing the price relief that followed last month's short-lived truce and pushing gasoline prices higher for consumers as far away as the United States.

A Widening, Unresolved War

The conflict, which began in late February with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites, has now stretched on for nearly five months, cycling through periods of intense bombardment, brief diplomatic openings, and renewed escalation. With bridges cut, a port tower collapsed, power plants damaged on both sides of the Gulf, and missiles now reaching as far as Syria and Qatar, the latest exchange suggests neither side is close to a durable resolution. Regional governments, shipping companies and energy markets are once again bracing for the war's next phase, with no clear diplomatic off-ramp currently in sight.

(With inputs from wire agencies)