(CNN) — The U.S. military carried out limited strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island on Monday, three U.S. officials told CNN, characterizing the action as defensive in nature and meant to protect U.S. assets in the region.
One official said the U.S. attack came in response to Iran firing at a U.S. aircraft. It does not appear to be the kind of major combat operation that officials have been contemplating, and the Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the operation, reported that other such strikes have been carried out previously in secret.
“This was a defensive measure for Iranians using surface to air missiles against U.S. assets,” another U.S. official said.
But the new action, on the eve of Election Day, is a reminder that the situation in Iran is still unresolved, and combat is still very much on the table.
One person familiar with the matter said the administration deliberately kept the attack under wraps in an effort not to overstate the defensive move. The person added that the strikes were meant to protect U.S. assets.
Iran’s state-affiliated Fars News Agency reported “several explosions” heard on Qeshm Island in the early hours of Tuesday morning local time. The blasts were also heard by residents of the nearby Hengam Island and those in the port city of Bandar Abbas, both sitting near or in the Strait of Hormuz, it reported.
Qeshm Island, which is about 14 miles from Bandar Abbas, is key to Iran’s continued attempts to assert control over traffic through the waterway critical to global energy supplies, through which about 20 million barrels of oil passed every day before the war. The U.S. has targeted the island previously in the war.
The attack comes as President Donald Trump on Monday suggested that diplomacy with Tehran is still at work, writing on social media that an agreement “could happen.”
Trump did not specifically address the reports of new strikes in Iran in an appearance that aired on Fox News Monday night, but he said the U.S. “might have to go after” Pickaxe Mountain, the suspected underground nuclear site where Israel believes Tehran has stored part of its enriched uranium stockpile and advanced enrichment centrifuges.
“That’s not a big deal. We can do it in literally, we can do that in one hour. Okay, as soon as we want, at any time we want,” he said.
Trump has teased the possibility of an attack multiple times since the war began, including in July, when he said the U.S. would hit Pickaxe Mountain “probably pretty soon.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned as recently as Saturday that a major new attack would be met with a response “without geographical limitations.” And a senior security official in Tehran told CNN that Iran would try to target infrastructure beyond oil facilities, including AI.
Earlier this month, Trump said that the U.S. would not attack Iran before the midterms, but did not rule out or confirm if strikes would resume afterward – leaving people living in the Middle East on edge.
In the Fox interview, Trump broadly defended his decision to launch the war in Iran and suggested there had not been recent fighting.
“We’re not fighting a war. Everyone says ‘you’re at war!’ Well, when was the last time we fired anything? This isn’t a war — it’s a very soft war … But this isn’t like a war that’s going on. There’s no war raging. It could happen if they don’t make a deal, but they want to make a deal very badly and there’s a very good chance we make a deal,” Trump said.
Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Monday that the U.S. and Iran have “made some progress” toward an off ramp to the war.
“The Iranians are always a little unpredictable, and as the president always says, he retains kinetic options, he retains non-kinetic options. But we’ve certainly made some progress. We’ll see if we can make some more,” the vice president said, adding that he had just spoken with the president about the war and both men felt “pretty good” about a potential deal.
Oil prices rose in early Asian trading on Tuesday after news broke of the Qeshm Island strike. Before then, oil prices had been tumbling, as the market weighed the latest developments in diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran – but gasoline and diesel prices are still on track to be the most expensive of any U.S. Election Day in history.
