Israel confirms strikes on Iran nuclear facility
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed on Friday that it carried out strikes on a nuclear complex in Iran’s Arak. The two separate strikes previously reported by Tehran targeted a heavy water facility used in hydrogen solutions. In a post shared on X, the IDF called the Iranian nuclear “weapons” program an “existential threat to Israel and the entire world,” vowing to stop its advancement.
U.S. can only confirm about a third of Iran’s missile arsenal destroyed, sources say
The United States can only determine with certainty that it has destroyed about a third of Iran’s vast missile arsenal as the U.S. and Israeli war on the country nears its one-month mark, according to five people familiar with the U.S. intelligence. The status of around another third is less clear but bombings likely damaged, destroyed or buried those missiles in underground tunnels and bunkers, four of the sources said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the information. One of the sources said the intelligence was similar for Iran’s drone capability, saying there was some degree of certainty about a third having been destroyed. The assessment, which has not been previously reported, shows that while most of Iran’s missiles are either destroyed or inaccessible, Tehran still has a significant missile inventory and may be able to recover some buried or damaged missiles once fighting stops.
The intelligence stands in contrast to President Donald Trump’s public remarks on Thursday that Iran had “very few rockets left”. He also appeared to acknowledge the threat from remaining Iranian missiles and drones to any future U.S. operations to safeguard the economically vital Strait of Hormuz. “The problem with the straits is this: let’s say we do a great job. We say we got 99% (of their missiles). 1% is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars,” Trump said at a televised Cabinet meeting on Thursday. Asked for comment, a Pentagon official said Iranian missile and drone attacks were down by about 90% since the start of the war. The U.S. military’s Central Command “has also damaged or destroyed over 66% of Iranian missile, drone, and naval production facilities and shipyards,” the official added. “If Iran is smart they’ve retained some of their capability – they’re not using everything that they have. And they’re laying in wait,” Moulton said. The Trump administration has said it aims to weaken Iran’s military by sinking its navy, destroying its missile and drone capability and ensuring that the Islamic Republic never has a nuclear weapon. Central Command has said its operation, known officially as “Epic Fury”, is on schedule or even ahead of plans laid out prior to the February 28 start of the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. U.S. strikes have hit more than 10,000 Iranian military targets as of Wednesday and, according to Central Command, have sunk 92 percent of the Iranian navy’s large vessels. The U.S. military has published imagery showing attacks on the factories that produce Iran’s weaponry and has stressed that it is not just pursuing missile and drone stockpiles, but the industry that makes them.
Still, Central Command has declined to state precisely how much of Iran’s missile or drone capability has been destroyed.
One source said part of the problem is determining how many Iranian missiles were stockpiled in underground bunkers before the war started. The U.S. has not disclosed its estimate of the size of Iran’s pre-war missile stockpile.
Israeli military officials say Iran had 2,500 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel before the war. Over 335 missile launchers have been “neutralized”, representing 70% of Iran’s launch capacity, a senior Israeli military official said.
Israeli officials have not publicly disclosed how many actual missiles they believe Iran still possesses. They privately acknowledge that eliminating what they estimate to be the last 30% of Iran’s capacity will be relatively more difficult to achieve. Despite the heavy pace of U.S. strikes, Iran has demonstrated that it has not run out of weapons.
On Thursday alone, it fired 15 ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates, along with 11 drones, according to the UAE’s Defense Ministry. It has also displayed new capabilities. Last week Iranian forces for the first time fired long-range missiles, targeting the U.S.-UK military base Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missile forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at Paris’ Sciences Po university, said the Trump administration may have overstated how much U.S. strikes have degraded Iranian capabilities. She pointed to Iran being able to continue to carry out strikes from Bid Kaneh military facility, which has been heavily bombed. “The fact that they’ve managed to sustain this, I think, indicates the U.S. was overstating the success of its operation,” Grajewski said, adding she believed that Iran still retained about 30 percent of its missile capabilities. Grajewski said Iran had more than a dozen large underground facilities where it has been able to keep launchers and missiles, adding: “The big question is: have these facilities collapsed?” One senior U.S. official voiced skepticism about the United States’ ability to accurately assess Iran’s missile capabilities, in part because it was unclear how many were underground and accessible in some way. “I don’t know if we’ll ever have an accurate number,” the official said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged the challenge posed by Iran’s tunneling in remarks on March 19, saying: “Iran is a vast country. And just like Hamas and their tunnels (in Gaza), they’ve poured any aid, any economic development, humanitarian aid, into tunnels and rockets.”
“But we are hunting them down methodically, ruthlessly and overwhelmingly, like no other military in the world can do, and the results speak for themselves,” he said, without providing details on the percentage of missiles or drones destroyed.
Reporting by Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali, Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco; additional reporting by Rami Ayyub in Jerusalem; Editing by Don Durfee and Gareth Jones
Iran reports US-Israeli strike on Arak nuclear site
The United States and Israel targeted the Arak nuclear complex on Friday, Iranian state media reported.
Two separate attacks focused on the Khondab heavy water facility. Heavy water or deuterium oxide is used in nuclear research as a solvent for hydrogen. While hits caused structural damage, no deaths or injuries have been reported.
The strikes come amid the US-promised pause on Iranian energy plants as strained negotiations between Washington and Tehran continue, where Iranian nuclear enrichment remains the most important point, together with Hormuz Strait regulation.
UK: Iran can’t hold global economy hostage
United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told reporters in France on Friday that the Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers have gathered to discuss how to resolve the issue of the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran cannot be able to just hold the global economy hostage,” she commented, further adding that the Strait must be reopened and that international shipping must be protected. Cooper went on to say that London is “deeply concerned” about the Russia-Iran ties, especially when it comes to exchanging weapons.
NN: SO how do you propose to open the straights? Blowing kisses? Soon they will figure out it will take boats guns and bloodshed. And as they shiver in their cold houses and can’t afford to fuel their cars they will belly up to the bar.
Two More Months of War Could Send Oil to $200
Oil prices could hit a record $200 per barrel if the war in the Middle East drags on through the entire second quarter, analysts at Macquarie Group have warned. The odds of the Iran war dragging on until June were put at 40% by the analysts in a note carried by Bloomberg. But the scenario of the war ending by the end of March currently appears more plausible, with odds at 60%, according to Macquarie.
“If the strait were to stay closed for an extended period, prices would need to move high enough to destroy an historically large amount of global oil demand,” Macquarie’s analysts wrote in the report.
“The timing of the re-opening of the straits, and physical damage to energy infrastructure, is the main determinant of the longer-term impact on commodities,” they added.
Many other analysts warn that if the Strait of Hormuz, which is already closed to most tanker traffic for nearly a month, remains blocked for another month or two, oil prices could jump to as high as $150 and even $200 per barrel, forcing a global economic shock. Analysts started expressing views that $200 oil is not a fantasy anymore—with 20% of global oil supply choked at the Strait of Hormuz buyers are racing to procure physical cargoes, refiners in Asia consider cutting processing rates, and Asian countries restrict fuel exports.
Andrew Harbourne, Wood Mackenzie’s senior analyst for oil markets, notes that the record 400-million-barrel release coordinated by the International Energy Agency (IEA) will cover only about four weeks of disruption in the Gulf.
“Strategic stocks remain an effective emergency buffer, but they are a one-off intervention that must eventually be rebuilt and cannot cover a sustained supply gap,” Harbourne added. Supply shocks in the past suggest that if the war and the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz persist, Brent crude prices could surge to $150 to $200 per barrel. For some petroleum products, such as diesel and jet fuel, the effective prices could be $200 to $250 a barrel or more, according to WoodMac.
NN: Enjoy!
The Iran War Is All About the Future of Hormuz
If Iranian leaders are, as Donald Trump says, “begging” him for terms to end the war, they have a very odd way of showing it. The negotiations he announced to soothe markets at the start of the week amounted to an exchange of demands that neither side could expect the other to accept. Factor in what both are actually doing — the US deploying a small ground force to the Persian Gulf and Iran legislating to turn the Strait of Hormuz into a permanent toll booth — and it seems we are in for a longer conflict. A lot has been said, including by some of America’s most storied generals, about how the US administration went into this fight: over-confident in its conventional military advantage, over-reliant on airpower and fundamentally misunderstanding the nature and asymmetric strengths of its enemy. As a result, it now has few good options. At this juncture, though, it’s probably more important to understand how the Iranians view their situation. And judging by the response Tehran sent to Trump’s 15-point peace offer, Iranian leaders believe they’re in a stronger position to see this out — and they don’t trust Trump enough for a quick settlement to be feasible, anyhow. Both Iranian beliefs are well-founded. From what we know of Trump’s 15-point peace proposal, it offers to end air strikes and lift sanctions in exchange for Tehran returning the Strait of Hormuz to its status as open seas; ending and demolishing its entire uranium enrichment program, civilian or otherwise; opening up to inspections that achieve complete transparency; accepting limits on the numbers and types of ballistic missiles it can have, configured for defense only; and ending all support for proxy militias abroad. In other words, it demands the capitulation the Iranians refused to accept in talks before the US and Israel launched air strikes on Feb. 28, but with the additional requirement that it reopen Hormuz, which became a problem in need of a solution only because of the war. The regime would accept such terms only if it had no hope of survival, which is not the case. The Iranians shot back with five conditions they say the US must meet before it will talk. These consisted of a halt to all US-Israeli hostilities against Iran, including assassinations; a halt to attacks on its regional proxies; concrete guarantees that none of these hostilities are renewed; war reparations; and — the big one — international recognition of Iran’s sovereign control over Hormuz. Yes, these are starting positions. On Thursday, Trump extended his ultimatum threatening to bomb Iran’s energy infrastructure by a further 10 days. He said this was due to an Iranian request, and that talks were going “very well.” That’s all conceivable, but also uncorroborated and unlikely to produce a result so long as both sides believe they have the upper hand, which it seems they do. It’s pretty clear why Trump would think so. He’s apparently getting a two-minute daily video that shows him the things the US blew up in Iran the day before. The combined American-Israeli force has sunk Iran’s conventional navy, destroyed much of its missile launching and manufacturing capacity and decapitated the Islamic Republic’s leadership. At least 7,000 Marines and troops from the 82nd Airborne are on their way to the Gulf to add some of the missing land dimension to US airpower. The Iranian case is more complex and militarily weaker, but it has a clearer path to strategic success. The most commonly cited aspect of this asymmetrical advantage is that all the Islamic Republic needs to do to win this war is to survive it, a low bar against airpower alone. Harder for outsiders to grasp is that the two US attacks on Iran — in June and again now — have also resolved a decades-long debate between regime hardliners and pragmatists as to whether the US was trustworthy enough to make normalization worth pursuing. It has also ended tactical restraint over issues such as closing Hormuz. Trump’s talk of a negotiation and potential deal is nothing more than a “a new deception — larger than the previous two.” That’s a reference to the nuclear negotiations that were underway both times the US struck. Second, that the Iranian leaders believe this US sleight of hand aims to obscure “the execution, within the coming days, of a major and decisive military operation against Iran in the Persian Gulf — an amphibious operation accompanied by heavy strikes on Iran’s infrastructure in the southern regions.” And finally, that the US was pressured into this war by Israel and the Gulf states, which collectively seek the “complete destruction of Iran,” making this an existential fight for Tehran. Once institutionalized, running Hormuz would allow the Iranians to turn it into a cash machine, tolling not just the ships that carry the 25% of the world’s seaborne oil and 20% of its liquid natural gas trade, but also the many other products that the Gulf states export via the strait. Germany’s Kiel Institute recently listed the top 50 products other than crude oil and LNG that passed through Hormuz in 2024, finding that they accounted for a cumulative $773 billion in value and an average 14.9% of total global exports for each product category.
Passing Hormuz
Share of global exports crossing the Strait in 2024
Before the war, the Iranian regime was bankrupt, out of ideas on how to fix the economy and under pressure from a furious population it could control only by jailing or killing them. Hormuz represents a potential route to its longer-term survival. That is not the kind of regime change Trump was hoping for. It’s also a potential precedent for other choke points, including the Red Sea or the Strait of Malacca. Tehran has discovered in Hormuz a geopolitical tool and deterrent far more powerful than its network of proxies, and more exploitable than owning a nuclear arsenal. The ability to choose which ships to let through and which to block, overcharge or detain for alleged safety violations would give Tehran enormous leverage and, in the process, upend a key pillar of the American century: the freedom of navigation that the US Navy guaranteed for its own economic benefit and that of its trading partners. This is why Tehran’s Majlis, or parliament, is rushing through wartime legislation to write a unilaterally claimed sovereignty over the strait into Iranian law. So transformative would this change be that the issue almost guarantees the conflict’s escalation until it gets resolved. That can come through force, as Trump again threatened on Thursday, or through the kinds of negotiated tradeoffs that Trump would be loathe to make, because they’d look so very much like defeat.
UAE demands the use of force to reopen Strait of Hormuz
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is pushing for a multinational force to secure and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing three people familiar with the matter. Officials said Abu Dhabi is urging allies, including the United States, to form a broad coalition to escort vessels and ensure safe passage, with the UAE ready to contribute its navy. “The focus is on creating as broad an international force as possible,” a source said, adding that the goal is not escalation but restoring global trade flows. The country is also working with Bahrain on a United Nations Security Council resolution to provide the mission with a mandate, though Russia and China could oppose the move, according to one of the sources. Meanwhile, Gulf states and Washington increasingly see naval escorts as necessary, while the White House said there is no timeline for tanker traffic.
NN: The world cannot allow Oran to control the Straights. On the other hand its the last card Iran has to play. This will be a big shit. Watch as oil tanker go up in flames.
Oil jumps over 5% after Trump’s comments on Iran
Crude oil prices continued to grow on Thursday, rising by more than 5% after United States President Donald Trump said that his country may not be “willing” to make a deal with Iran anymore, even though they are “begging” for one. He also noted that Washington has other targets it wants to hit in Iran “before leaving,” and that seizing the Middle Eastern country’s oil is “an option.” The US president’s comments followed reports that Iran sent their official response to the American 15-point peace plan to Washington through intermediaries, and that Tehran views Trump’s five-day deadline for reaching a deal as “a new Trump deception.”
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for May’s deliveries jumped by 5.4% to go for $95.20 per barrel at 12:33 pm ET. Meanwhile, Brent for the same month’s settlements soared by 6.51% and went for $108.87 per barrel at 12:33 pm ET.
Blackrock Oil may still spike to $150 a barrel
BlackRock Inc. President Rob Kapito said investors may be underestimating the risks stemming from the Iran war, which are likely to weigh on growth and drive inflation higher even if the conflict ends soon. Growth could be hit by as much as two percentage points, while inflation may rise by a similar margin even if the war ends shortly, warned Kapito at the Asia Pacific Financial and Innovation Symposium in Melbourne on Thursday.
Oil may still spike to $150 a barrel even “if we announce tomorrow the war is over,” as it would take time for disrupted supply chains to return to full capacity.
“What if this disruption is a week, six months, a year — what is it going to mean for the companies that I own?” Kapito said. “My biggest concern is that people aren’t looking at this – they’re just making the assumption” for an optimistic outcome. The S&P 500 index of US stocks has fallen less than 5% since the war began almost a month ago, while some defensive trades have misfired. Gold has fallen almost 15%, and Treasuries — which typically offer portfolio ballast — have declined as rising oil prices trigger inflation concerns.
In the past, “when there was a conflict like this, you bought short-term Treasuries, you bought gold and you shorted the equity market,” Kapito said, highlighting the uneven market response to the war. At the same event in Melbourne, Apollo Global Management’s President Jim Zelter also cautioned about a heightened risk of a US recession and to the credit cycle from a prolonged conflict. The warnings highlight growing concern that markets are too complacent about the economic fallout from the conflict, particularly the potential for prolonged disruptions to energy and shipping that may ripple across global supply chains. Zelter said US consumers who have been a bulwark of the economy for the last few years are already showing signs of distress. Consumer confidence in the first two months of the year had been waning, and higher oil prices will cause further pain to their pockets, he added. “It’s not really a rates shock, it’s a confidence shock on spending in the largest economy in the world,” Zelter said. Despite the prospect of slower growth and higher inflation linked to the war, Kapito said he remains upbeat over the long term, citing themes such as AI and the rise of private markets as key tailwinds for investors.