Tehran responds to Trump’s risk by saying all US vitality infrastructure within the area might be focused if Iran is attacked.
Revealed On 22 Mar 2026
United States President Donald Trump has threatened to assault Iran’s energy vegetation if freedom of navigation is just not totally restored on the Strait of Hormuz inside 48 hours, a dramatic escalation because the US-Israeli battle on Iran continues for a fourth week.
The assertion on Saturday got here as Trump faces rising stress to safe the important waterway that Iran has promised to maintain closed to “enemy ships”, resulting in hovering oil costs and plunging inventory markets.
“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, inside 48 HOURS from this precise time limit, the US of America will hit and obliterate their varied POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST,” Trump, who’s in his Florida dwelling for the weekend, wrote on Reality Social at 23:44 GMT.
He didn’t specify which plant he was referring to as the most important.
Following Trump’s risk, the Iranian military mentioned it might goal all vitality infrastructure belonging to the US within the area if Iran’s gas and vitality infrastructure had been attacked.
Trump’s escalatory feedback got here barely a day after he talked about “winding down” the battle that he launched alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 28, when the US and Iran had been engaged in nuclear negotiations.
In a social media submit on Friday, Trump mentioned the US was “getting very near assembly our goals as we take into account winding down our nice Navy efforts within the Center East”.
Key waterway
Transport site visitors via the Strait of Hormuz, the place a fifth of the world’s oil and gasoline passes via throughout peacetime, has nearly floor to a halt because the early days of the battle.
Iran has mentioned the Strait of Hormuz is open to all besides the US and its allies, with Minister of Overseas Affairs Abbas Araghchi saying final week that he had been “approached by a variety of international locations” searching for protected passage for his or her vessels.
“That is as much as our navy to determine,” he informed the US tv community CBS, including {that a} group of ships from “completely different international locations” had been allowed to go, with out offering particulars.
The top of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, asserted on Saturday that Iran’s skill to assault vessels on the strait had been “degraded” after US fighter jets dropped 5,000-pound (about 2,300kg) bombs on an underground Iranian coastal facility storing antiship cruise missiles and cellular launchers earlier this week.
The strike additionally destroyed “intelligence help websites and missile radar relays” used to watch ship actions, Cooper mentioned.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Manuel Rapalo mentioned there appeared to be a “hole between what the White Home seems to need within the Strait of Hormuz and what the US navy says they’ve already completed”.
“It’s fascinating, to say on the very least, to listen to Trump speaking a few main escalation, given the truth that we’ve been listening to all through the course of the day how a lot injury the US has carried out, supposedly, to Iran’s skill to focus on oil tankers and vessels navigating via the strait.”
