Donald Trump’s top White House aides are urgently pushing to prevent the Iran war from escalating, after the US ramped up the intensity of its attacks on Wednesday.
The aides want to prevent the war escalating before November's midterm elections to hinder Republican electoral losses, four sources told the Reuters news agency.
Officials will consider once again ramping up military action after the vote in November, but a return to the full-scale conflict is not a fiven, they said.
"We are keeping the pressure on Iran," one White House official said. "But November is a priority."
It comes after Iran vowed to respond with “crushing and devastating blows” after US strikes killed five people attending a wedding party in Iran.
Iranian state media reported explosions across southern coastal areas, including Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island. Tehran also said US strikes hit civilian sites in Hormozgan province and a civilian airport in Kerman province.
One of the strikes hit a home in Kuhestak where a wedding ceremony was taking place, killing five people, including a child, and wounding at least 68 others, according to Hormozgan provincial officials.
Centcom said it concluded its latest barrage against Iranian military targets on Tuesday night.
Senior aides to Donald Trump are pushing to prevent the Iran war from escalating, after the US ramped up the intensity of its attacks on Wednesday.
The aides want to prevent the war escalating before November's midterm elections to hinder Republican electoral losses, four sources told the Reuters news agency.
Officials will consider once again ramping up military action after the vote in November, but a return to the full-scale conflict is not a fiven, they said.
They said that for now, the administration is focused on tightening the economic pressure on Iran in an effort to extract concessions in any future negotiation that months of military action failed to secure.
"We are keeping the pressure on Iran," one White House official said. "But November is a priority."
Keeping the war mostly contained until then would help prevent the unpopular conflict from dominating the news as Trump's Republicans campaign to defend thin majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, said the sources, three of whom are White House officials.
While President Trump and his self-styled secretary of state for “War”, Pete Hegseth, dismissed it as ‘fake news’, by all accounts, life for the 5,000 men and women on board the USS Abraham Lincoln had become a living nightmare after more than 260 days at sea without respite.
The nuclear-powered warship left San Diego in November and has, until recently, been stationed in the Middle East to support the U.S. war against Iran. While the Lincoln left the Middle East on August 22 on its way home, with a planned Thailand stop, she has spent a record amount of time at sea without a port visit. Stories abound about poor food, bad hygiene, blocked toilets, intermittent showers, plummeting morale and shredded mental health. Reports in the Military Times and the Stars and Stripes claimed that sailors even tried to jump overboard as the deployment kept going.
Two oil tankers hit sea mines and were disabled while attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Wednesday.
In a statement shared by state media, the guards said the tankers had been forced to disembark their crews and were placed in the hands of US operatives to pass through what it called an "illegal route" in the strategic waterway.
It came despite earlier warnings from the Guards' navy about the dangers of crossing the mined passage, the statement added.
Two Filipino seafarers have been killed in a security incident in the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia's national shipping company, Bahri, said on Wednesday.
The incident involved the company’s vessel "SIDR" while it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz on August 31, it said.
Pakistan is working with the US and Iran to end their conflict and believes they will soon “return to the table for dialogue”.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi made the comments at a regular media briefing on Wednesday.
The visit last month of Pakistan's Chief of Defence Forces Asim Munir to Tehran created "considerable momentum" on the issue of the Strait of Hormuz, he said.
Iran is secretly developing advanced supersonic cruise missiles with the help of Russia, according to a report.
The C430L programme, which has spanned several years since 2023, has seen Moscow’s top missile specialists helping produce the weapons that would significantly strengthen Tehran’s military, with the prospect of total peace with the US currently looking bleak.
It was reported by the Financial Times, which dubbed the programme as one of the most “significant known transfers of strategic military technology from Moscow to Tehran”.
Moscow is assisting Tehran in developing a ramjet propulsion system, which would enable cruise missiles to fly much faster than the speed of sound, according to military patents and leaked Russian correspondence, the FT reported.
Iranian missile expert Fabian Hinz, an analyst at Conflict Armament Research, told the outlet: “This is the transfer of a highly strategically sensitive military technology from Russia that the Iranians have wanted to acquire for decades. A programme like this would require political clearance from the very top in Russia.”
Donald Trump has insisted that the US has “almost total control” of the Strait of Hormuz.
“I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing”, the US president said of Iran on Truth Social earlier Wednesday morning. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”
Maritime traffic in the vital oil waterway has remained muted during the war, with just five ships passing through in the last 24 hours, according to the Hormuz Strait Monitor.
Firefighters in Kuwait rushed to contain a blaze at a residential complex in the capital after it was struck by an Iranian drone.
Public Fire Force spokesperson Brigadier General Mohammed Al-Gharib said on Wednesday, that the fire had been doused and blamed “a hostile drone” from Iran for the attack.
Peru has severed diplomatic ties with Iran after accusing it of escalating conflict in the Middle East and restricting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
“The government of the Republic of Peru has decided to sever diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the Peruvian foreign ministry said.
Lima raised concerns over what it called Tehran’s repression of peaceful protests, restrictions on press freedom, discrimination against women and girls, and persecution of political opponents.
