On the morning of 9 September 2026, smoke was still rising from the hull of the M/T Riesco — an Iranian crude carrier caught on video, ablaze at an undisclosed location — when Tehran announced it would not absorb the blow quietly. Within hours, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared that it had fired ballistic missiles at a Jordanian base used by American forces, a significant expansion of a confrontation that had begun, just a day earlier, with a US military operation that destroyed five Iranian oil tankers. The Revolutionary Guard also reported that it had attacked ten commercial vessels in the region. In a further escalation, Iran's navy issued explicit warnings that tankers operating near the waters off Kuwait and Bahrain could become targets.

The warnings were enough to send anxiety through global shipping markets, as the Persian Gulf and its approaches carry a substantial share of the world's seaborne oil. Whether the strikes on the ten ships caused casualties or serious damage had not been confirmed at the time of writing. The confrontation did not unfold in isolation. In parallel, Israel announced it would close Britain's consulate in east Jerusalem and bar entry to twelve British nationals — among them former prime minister Jeremy Corbyn — in retaliation for London's sanctions on Israeli settlements.

France and ten other countries moved swiftly to join Britain in banning goods produced in those settlements, signalling that Western unity on the question of Israeli policy was shifting in ways that Tel Aviv had not anticipated.