MIDDLE EAST CRISIS LIVE: TRUMP THREATENS ‘VERY HARD’ ATTACK ON IRAN TONIGHT AND SAYS US WILL SEIZE KHARG ISLAND
By Guardian - Tom Ambrose/Aneesa Ahmed/Taz Ali/Jonathan Yerushalmy -Thu 11 Jun 2026 15.40 BST
President says US will take vital fuel hub ‘in not too distant future’ and will ‘assume total control of their oil and gas markets’.
Three Indian seafarers were killed in a US attack on an oil tanker earlier this week, India’s shipping minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, said.
“It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello. Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified,” he wrote in a post on X.
The US Central Command had accused the Settebello of violating an American blockade on Iranian ports.
In a post on X, it said: “At 11:14 p.m. on June 9, US forces disabled an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman for the second consecutive day after another vessel violated the ongoing blockade by attempting to transport oil from Iran.”
It added that a US aircraft “fired precision munitions into the ship’s engine room after the crew repeatedly failed to comply with directions from American forces”.
The US-Iran ceasefire is more like a “lesser fire”, UN secretary-general António Guterres has said, urging all parties to “work towards a diplomatic settlement”.
“We should not minimize the risks of lesser fire becoming full fire,” Guterres said in his post on X.
The Middle East is being pulled deeper into crisis & the consequences reach far beyond the region.”
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Kuwait resumes air traffic with flights set to resume
Kuwait’s civil aviation authority has announced that air traffic has resumed after it was suspended due to Iranian attacks.
Officials earlier announced that some flights were being diverted to alternative airports, after Kuwait said its air defences were firing at aerial targets.
In its statement, the civil aviation authority said Kuwait’s international airport was working normally, with flights set to resume.
Andrew Roth
As the story of the US-Iran war is written direct to social media, Donald Trump may be the genre’s premier unreliable narrator.
On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump warned of a fierce response to Iran’s missile and drone attacks on US allies in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, but also said that a deal was within reach.
“We’re gonna hit ’em again hard today … and we’ll see what happens with a deal,” he said. “We’re really close to a deal but they keep on tapping us along, they keep playing us for suckers.”
The barrage and whiplash of White House claims of imminent deals and then threats that “a whole civilization will die tonight” have kept Trump squarely where he wants to be – dominating the news cycle – but they have also increasingly eroded trust in his declarations, even in life-and-death issues concerning a war.
Other leaders appear to be playing on the credibility gap within the US administration. Trump said he planned to tell Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to retaliate against Iran this week, but when Israel did strike Iran, he claimed in a BBC interview that the “missiles had already gone”. He later denied that Netanyhau had defied him, adding that when he tells Netanyahu “to do something, he does it”.
Similarly, the US president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with airstrikes on its civil and energy infrastructure – a campaign that many international observers have characterised as a potential war crime – but then repeatedly reverted to diplomacy or ultimatums with two-week windows that are soon forgotten.
The Trump administration is once again stuck, unable to translate its military superiority into political acquiescence, with little indication of movement on the ground in negotiations other than the president’s own volatile posts to Truth Social.
Andrew Roth - Guardian
