A couple and their two-year-old child were killed when a US missile struck a residential building on Qeshm island on Wednesday night. Iranian state media confirmed the deaths. Two other children from the same family, aged seven and nine, were pulled from the rubble and hospitalised. They survived. They are now orphaned. US Central Command said it had 'successfully completed a heavy wave of strikes' against dozens of IRGC targets — military command centres, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities. CENTCOM did not mention the couple. It did not mention the child.
The targets struck on Wednesday stretched across eight locations in southern Iran. Bandar Abbas, Kish, Abu Musa, Qeshm, Ahvaz, Abadan, Kazerun, Bushehr. Power outages in Ahvaz after strikes on the oil-rich Khuzestan province. Three IRGC personnel killed. Three civilians confirmed dead. A US official described the scale to the Jerusalem Post as 'about twice the size of the previous' bombardment. The five-day pause ended. The war resumed at double the previous intensity.
The pattern now has a measurable shape. The first MOU lasted 19 days. The second pause lasted five. Each iteration of ceasefire produces a smaller gap before the next wave. CENTCOM's commander recommended stopping the campaign because it had reached the limit of its effectiveness. The campaign resumed at double the scale within 24 hours of the recommendation going unconsidered.
The strikes were not only in Iran. US and Saudi forces jointly struck militia bases in Iraq on Wednesday — the first time Iraqi territory was targeted in this wave. Twenty Hashed al-Shaabi fighters were killed. Five Iranian advisors were among the dead. AFP correspondents saw their coffins draped with Iranian flags. Iraq condemned what it called a dangerous escalation against an official security institution. Baghdad denied prior knowledge of the strikes, directly contradicting Trump's claim that they had been coordinated with the Iraqi government. Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' Al-Sudani had visited both Washington and Tehran earlier this month. He visited them separately. The strikes hit the territory between them.
The IRGC responded by announcing it had stopped three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, insisting Iran has 'full control' of the waterway. Washington imposed new sanctions on entities it accused of extorting ships transiting the strait. The same week that Iran and the US both charged tolls for Hormuz passage and both dropped their tolls and both resumed their tolls and both resumed their bombing, the IRGC is now stopping individual tankers and asserting sovereign control over a body of water that international law defines as an international passage. Both sides are now claiming authority over the same waterway and conducting military operations to enforce that claim simultaneously.
Tuesday's piece on this page covered what the Trump-Netanyahu meeting produced: the productive label, the mutual language, Iran's missiles on Jordan. What the meeting produced after that — the doubling of the bombardment, the Iraqi strikes, the Qeshm deaths — is what Tuesday became by Wednesday. Tuesday had a meeting. Wednesday had a heavy wave. The meeting was described as one of the best conversations Netanyahu and Trump had ever had. The wave was twice the size of the previous one.
The CNN assessment of Wednesday's events applied precisely: the US war in Iran is in desperate need of new thinking. Trump has not shown he can bomb Tehran back to the negotiating table. The options remaining — a ground war or recognising Iranian control of the Strait — are so unpalatable that, as CNN noted, the phrase 'no good options' has become a cliché. The bombing doubled. The options narrowed. The phrase became slightly more accurate.
The couple on Qeshm died in a residential building. Their two-year-old died with them. CENTCOM's statement listed the categories of targets struck. Residential buildings are not in the categories. They are in the strike zone. The heavy wave was powerful, CENTCOM said. It was successful. The child was two years old.
