At eleven years old, a girl in Hamad City was already old enough to remember the last time air-raid sirens pierced the Bahraini night — but she had never, until Thursday, been carried to a clinic with shrapnel wounds. Her injury, described by Bahrain's Interior Ministry as minor, was nonetheless a precise and human measure of how badly an April ceasefire between Washington and Tehran had frayed by the second consecutive day of exchanged strikes across the Middle East. US Central Command confirmed that it had completed a fresh wave of what it called self-defence strikes against military, surveillance, and radar installations in southern Iran, an assault launched only hours after President Donald Trump warned publicly that American forces would hit Iran hard once more. Trump had offered little diplomatic nuance in his framing: Tehran, he argued, had taken too long to agree to a permanent end to the conflict, and patience had run out.

The strikes followed a pattern now grimly familiar — American firepower delivered before dawn, justified in the language of necessity rather than choice. Iran's response was neither slow nor quiet. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it fired twelve ballistic missiles at the Muwaffaq Salti Airbase in Jordan, claiming the destruction of a large number of US fighter jets and facilities, though those assertions could not be independently verified. Military bases in both Bahrain and Kuwait came under Iranian fire for a second day running, while Kuwait temporarily closed its airspace and its army confirmed that air-defence systems had intercepted hostile aerial targets.

Iran also claimed to have struck two oil tankers navigating the Strait of Hormuz, announcing that the waterway was closed to all vessels — a claim that Centcom disputed, insisting that commercial shipping continued to move through the strait.