Trump sinks Iranian ship as US admits nuclear deal unlikely | Iran war news today

I'm Vinisha Rainey. I'm Roland Olyphant. It's Monday 7th September 2026, the seventh month of the US-Iran war. On today's episode, Iran and Oman, or at least one of them, says that they're on the cusp of announcing a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But what will Trump make of it? And it comes on the back of more strikes in the Strait over the weekend. Plus, violence is ramping up in Lebanon and Yemen. We've got all the details about what's been going on. Roland, welcome back. Another week of the US-Iran war. Shall we start on the Strait of Hormuz? There were strikes over the weekend and we think a deal is coming today. Let's do a chronologically show over the weekend. So Saturday, there was an exchange of fire which takes the form of kind of escalating tit for tat. I will hit you back harder if you hit me first. US military CENTCOM said it had permanently disabled two Iran-linked oil tankers, one near Karg Island, the big oil terminal up in the northern Gulf, another near Jask, and a third completely destroyed. That one was just outside the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait. Iran's state media confirmed those strikes. And so Tehran responded by attacking three US-affiliated vessels in response, as well as three oil tankers travelling through the Strait of Hormuz along an unauthorised route. So six for three. I don't have any more details about those, about which ships were apparently targeted by the Iranians there. They're going back to the American operations. On Saturday, three Iranian tankers were Downey, the Stark one, and the Kilo, also known as the Noxon. Let me get this right. I think Downey was near Karg and the Stark was near Jask. Those two were struck with strikes on their engine rooms. Disabled, usual thing. They've released the video of a pilot saying, you know, you have 10 minutes to clear the deck. I'm about to strike your engine room. A missile or a cannon round or something straight into the stern. The Kilo was sunk, literally sunk, outside the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman. They say it was unladen, so it wasn't carrying any crude oil at the time. Unladen? Potato, potatoe, which we'll get onto later. You know, grass or grass. It blew up in quite dramatic fashion. If you watch the video, I mean, just huge spurts of flame coming out the side and so on. God knows what it would look like if it did have oil on board and it went on its side and sunk. I don't know if there's anyone on board that. The Americans say that no US personnel were hurt. I haven't heard any reports of people being hurt in this, but if there was anyone on board that ship that was turned over, I think it was stationary. It may have been abandoned or something. And do we know why the Americans struck these Iranian ships? Because we had this tit-for-tat strikes last week, and it felt like it had sort of died down a bit. So going back to the tit-for-tat thing I began with, so the Iranians raised the bar with their response. The Americans say this was them raising the bar from an Iranian attack. So they said that we struck three ships because the Iranians struck two of ours. So they said that the Iranians tried to attack an aircraft carrier and a missile destroyer. They said that those attacks were unsuccessful. They said the carrier and destroyer, which they didn't name, successfully evaded Iranian attacks. Multiple unprovoked Iranian attacks, in fact, according to US Central Command. And they were quite explicit in this kind of playground logic. Let the message to the IRGC be clear. If you shoot at two of our ships, we'll impose an even higher economic cost taking out three of yours. So you can see what's happening. No more, as far as I can tell, no more since then at the moment. But we know how it goes. It flares up, it flares off. So I'm going to get onto the diplomatic back and forth about the Gulf in a second. But off the back of that, you might be interested in the through traffic, please. So current through traffic, an average of 10 commodity ships transiting straight per day over the past 10 days, the lowest since May. That is according to Kepler, that shipping monitoring firm found. And that's according to shipping data on Monday, so in the past 10 days. Down more than 15 on Friday and nearly 13 on Saturday. Only two vessels passed through the strait on Saturday. Six went through on Sunday, mostly using the Iranian route. Interesting. I mean, risk up, essentially. Ships get hit, risk up. You have that. And then you have what the American or what the Trump administration is saying. Chris Wright was on ABC over the weekend, boasting that a lot was getting out, which we've heard repeatedly from Trump officials. Let's just hear a clip of him talking about that. You said that Monday we broke a wartime record with 17 million barrels a day passing through. The average before the war was 20 million barrels a day. Have we sustained that this week? What was our seven day average? The seven day average right now is a little over nine million barrels a day, which is the highest the seven day average has ever been. So it continues to migrate up. And then there's also the bypass pipelines through Saudi Arabia, through the United Arab Emirates. And when you add those together, the flow out of that region is more like 13, 14 million barrels a day. I think what's really interesting there is that that war of narratives continues. And it's really hard to get to the bottom of what is actually going on because so many of these ships are turning their transponders off. But I think the fact that there continues to be kinetic action in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran striking ships, America responding, suggests the Americans must be getting some stuff out because the Iranians are targeting it. So it's all part of this battle for the Strait of Hormuz, which is going on secretly. And we only hear about the sort of surface bit. It feels a bit like an iceberg to me. There's clearly a lot going on under the surface that we can't get to because how do you independently report on this stuff? We get the statements from the Trump administration. We get the official data that people like Kepler can track. We get the Iranian statement saying it's all closed. We're going to declare a new closed zone, all of this. And that's the truth somewhere under the middle. Yes, we have lots of different conflicting statements and it's difficult for us to establish. The cautionary note that was put out by kind of maritime agencies about the increased risk, was talking about increased risk to ships using that American escorting route. And therefore, yes, I mean, we remain in the same place we've discussed before in the podcast, which is that there seems to be more getting out than appears on the surface because of transponders being turned off and this shuttle service that we've talked about before and so on. And I'd remind listeners that those who watch this for a living, the Lloyd's listeners and people like that out there, do caution that the American claims of stuff getting out seem to be at the upper end of what is plausible optimistic. That doesn't mean they're not actually getting more out. So perhaps your best thing is to watch the oil markets and the oil price. I presume they have some kind of insight into the proportion of flows. The New York Times report found that August was the deadliest month for merchant vessels in the Strait of Hormuz since March. So I think that suggests that the Americans are trying to get stuff out and the Iranians are not taking it down. Well, there are ships there to get here. Yeah, I suppose that makes the point. So let's move on to today. Diplomatic stuff. Today. Well, well, today, before we get to diplomatic stuff, just a little bit of physical action. Oman says it's evacuated 16 crew members from a Saudi-owned tanker, which was attacked by Iran last Monday. So two Filipino seafarers died on that attack, I think. They say two Filipino seafarers died. They now say they've evacuated 16 members of crew from that ship. I don't have any other information that I thought worth mentioning. They're announcing that now. I don't know why they've been evacuated now as opposed to at the time. Must have been quite a bad attack if the ship couldn't continue sailing, clearly. Presumably, yeah. OK, but now, yes, so no more kinetic action since Saturday, but a bit of diplomatic action. The first thing is that the Iranians are saying they're going to introduce a new exclusion zone. This is Mohsen Rezaei, the head of Iran's National Security Council, went on state television yesterday, Sunday, the day after all this back and forth. And he said Iran plans to announce a new exclusion zone outside the Straits at vessels that it believes are attempting to transit the waterway without Iranian permission. Didn't offer many details at all, but this is what he did say. The new restricted zone will begin from where the US blockade of Iran begins and extend into the area into the Gulf. Any ship entering this zone will be added to a sanctions list. In addition, maps detailing passage routes will also be soon approved, he said. Now, is this on the Indian Ocean side of the Strait of Hormuz, do you think, or the Persian Gulf side? Well, he seems to be suggesting it starts outside in the Indian Ocean side, but it extends into the Gulf. OK. So exactly what that means, I'm not sure, and how that differs from what's actually going on. But then he also talks about, you know, maps of a new international corridor which lies in Iranian and Omani waters in which Iran will have management have been agreed and should be signed off in the coming days. He's referring there to the ongoing Iranian-Omani talks, and he's basically saying we have a deal and us and the Omanis are going to publish it soon. You referenced that at the beginning of this conversation. I would say I would leave it when I see it, because we've had this suggested several times over the past few weeks. And he also reiterates the Iranian position. So no news here, but it's worth just admitting it hasn't changed. We will only commit to this. We will only commit to the Strait of Hormuz being open when they, the Americans, stop the sabotage, threats and attacks on Iran. You lift the blockade and then we'll open the strait. And that's what they've always been saying. So there you are, the Iranians are still the Iranians and they are still sticking to their guns, as it were. Well, that's just it, isn't it? You have this Iran-Oman deal, but I mean, there's a third player in this and it's the Americans. Is Trump going to want to play ball? Is he going to lift the blockade? Presumably Iran and Oman are not going to announce a deal before Iran gets some sort of concessions out of America. Does Trump want to do that? I think it's a big question. Does Trump go along with it? Yes. And there's also, if I may, there's some diplomatic blowback from neighbouring countries this morning on this. So there's a summit going on Abu Dhabi with important people there. We had a couple of statements from Gulf officials. So Anwar Ghargash, that kind of chief diplomatic adviser to the president of the UAE, saying no single state should control the strait of Hormuz. Our energy experts will not be held hostage, nor will our trade and economic activity. Using an international waterways as an instrument of coercion is unacceptable. He said, you know, the UAE's position on this, which has been hawkish. And yet at the same time acknowledging that, you know, things probably aren't going to get through with just war. Qatar's foreign ministry spokesman at the same event in Abu Dhabi saying that this is interesting. We need to realise in the Gulf that having international forces in the region, having a strategic alliance with the United States is very important, but is not enough. Self-sufficiency when it comes to security is the only way forward. Yes, we need our partners. Yes, we need our allies. But we cannot depend on them alone for our security. Fascinating. Well, I mean, this whole question about the future of the US presence in the Gulf, which this whole war has thrown into question, that question being raised there. There's no specific answer, but he is addressing the question circulating. You know, what is the long-term prospects for the American presence in that part of the world? Interesting. There have been quite a few comments from various American officials I want to get on to now. So we heard from Leon Panetta. Now, he's a former US defence secretary and before that CIA director, both under Obama. So 2011 to 2013, he was defence secretary. From 2009 to 2011, he was CIA director. He was talking to The Guardian and he basically said, it's not going to be a big surprise to anyone who's listening to this, but it comes from a senior official. So worth explaining, this war risks becoming another forever war in the Middle East. He says it's on course to become another failed war, just like Iraq, just like Afghanistan. His quote, it's no mystery that the United States and Iran are caught up in a terrible stalemate in which there are really very few options available to bring this war to an end. I think the likelihood is this war is going to continue for another six months without being resolved. So he's putting a timeline on that six months, which I thought was interesting. He also outlines three options for Trump and we've heard versions of this before, but I'm going to share them with our audience because he's a former defence secretary and he knows a lot more than us. One, walk away, admit failure. It's unlikely, but I personally think don't put it beyond Trump to find a way to walk away and spin it as a victory. Two, draw out the current stalemate, continue this tit-for-tat violence. No massive escalation, but no negotiations or surrender either. That's what we're seeing at the moment. Three, a bigger military action. This is something David Blair's spoken about continuously on this podcast. Go harder, take control of the Strait of Hormuz and try and remove Iran's leverage over this issue, which would be costly in terms of money, in terms of service members' lives, in terms of political capital. Isn't the implication of everything we've just gone through earlier that they've kind of done that? We're saying that there's more ships getting through than were before. The Americans have, in a way, they've at least loosened that grip on the Strait. But sort of covertly, I guess. Yes, either way. But Iran is still able to attack ships, so not that successfully yet. I thought that was interesting, those three options. He's clearly calling it a war, but we've heard from President Trump again that he doesn't think it's a war. In fact, he dismissed the conflict as small potatoes, or potatoes, depending on how you'd like to say that. He was asked last week about Vance saying it was not a war, which we discussed in the podcast, and he responded with this. Well, I'll tell you what, a lot of people don't call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big thing. We did Venezuela and we did this. In Venezuela, we lost nobody. In this, we lost 18 people. And in Vietnam, you lost 100,000 people. And in other conflicts, you lost tens of thousands of people. I would say that it's intermittent. We do intermittent strikes. So I heard what he said, and it was interesting because I think that there's a lot of truth. We're not fighting right now. There's no fighting. We're taking out a lot of oil. We control the Hormuz Strait. We control it very strongly. We looked at his sinking approval ratings in our midterms bonus episode over the weekend, and it's really linked to the war, of course, because it's driven up the price of petrol or gas if you're in America, and all the associated costs that come with that. So I do get why he's trying to play it down, but I don't know, if I was an American citizen, I would find this a bit offensive. Not only is it affecting ordinary people's lives, but it's cost the US taxpayer at least $37 billion, left 18 service members killed, 18 US service members. If this isn't a war, what, I mean, you know, we've said this before, but I think it's a war. Any quibbles there? There's large-scale wars and relatively small wars, and there's long wars and long wars, short wars, cold wars, cold wars, you know, low-level insurgency wars, conventional wars. There's all kinds of wars. No, I think it would be naive and misleading to characterize this as anything other than a war. It walks, talks, and acts like a war. Yeah. We mentioned Energy Secretary Chris Wright earlier. He also declined to call it a war. He called it a military conflict. But crucially, there's another bit I wanted to bring in here. He admitted that there might never be a nuclear agreement with Iran. This was him speaking to ABC over the weekend. There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don't know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is. If Iran has nuclear weapons, the Middle East, the world, is a wildly different place than it is today. Mr. Secretary, I've got to stop you there. You said we may not get a nuclear agreement. So how do we keep them from having a nuclear weapon? Just keep bombing when they build things up? Get to destroy their capabilities to do it. They built a massive missile infrastructure to manufacture missiles, which you see them firing today. But they don't have the capability to build more missiles. We are degrading their capacity to develop nuclear weapons and ultimately to deliver them if they develop them. It is a 47-year-long effort. This is not trivial. But the United States will get the job done and we will work in cooperation with our allies in the region. And I think you'll see countries from around the world joining this effort as well. I wonder what you make of that. The nuclear stuff was supposed to be the one main goal for this war. It was stated at the beginning. We've heard it stated repeatedly, even as this war morphs into whatever else it is. And now, potentially, they're even dropping that as a goal? Well, they're dropping the deal as a goal, right? He said we're degrading their ability to develop a weapon and then deliver it if they get it. So, you know, it's partly just a statement of fact, right? I mean, I don't see how you bridge the gap that exists at the moment. I don't know how you get back to a nuclear agreement. You know, from the starting points that either side is at at the moment, how do you get back to the agreements that previously existed? So, you know, I mean, it would not surprise me at all if another nuclear agreement doesn't appear. I mean, I would suggest that, actually, a nuclear agreement may have to wait until a new American administration, because I think the likelihood is that there will be a new American administration, a new American president, before there is a new regime in Tehran, unless something dramatic happens in the next two years. It's not impossible. And if that was to be a leader who is, you know, more sympathetic to previous, more traditional approaches to Iran, then you might see a resumption of that more conventional kind of diplomacy. But, yeah, I mean, it would be naive to say, right, we're going to have a... Anyone who says right now, yeah, we're definitely going to have a nuclear deal, I mean, you would say that they're being naive and perhaps kind of counting their chickens before they're hatched. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, let's move over to one of the other theses of conflict, which we haven't been discussing much recently, and that's because it's been quiet. I mean, there have been peace talks underway, US-brokered peace talks between Lebanon and Israel, but that seems to be falling apart in recent days. So there's been a wave of Israeli attacks over the past 48 hours against Lebanon. So today we had airstrikes on a residential building in the town of Kfar Oman in southern Lebanon, killed nine people, including two children, according to Lebanon's national news agency. Eleven more were injured, including four children, two women. We had a separate Israeli drone attack on a civilian vehicle, killing two medics inside the car. They also struck a residential area in the town of Deir al-Zahrani in southern Lebanon overnight, issued a forced evacuation order. The Israeli army said it was targeting a building near Hezbollah facility, which it claims was used to launch an explosive drone. And then yesterday, at least seven people were killed, 20 others wounded in Israeli airstrikes on the town of Arab Salim in the Nabatea district. So a massive ramping up of the violence there. This all comes off the back of a reasonably significant military conquest? Some more territory they've taken in southern Lebanon, right? Right, so this is the Ali Taha Ridge, which became a bit of a thing because I think it was Friday or several days ago when I was presenting a report of this. Reuters had got hold of the fact that the Iranians had sent a message, not to the Israelis, but to the Americans, warning the Americans that they would strike Israel very hard if Israel went ahead with an assault on a place called the Ali Taha Ridge in southern Lebanon. And it was briefed, not by the Iranians, to be fair, and not by Hezbollah themselves. I'm not even sure by the Israelis, I'm not sure where it came from, but the idea was that they were Iranian soldiers, handlers, advisors, holed up in this ridge with Hezbollah at the time. Now, that seems to actually have been played down in recent days over the weekend by Israeli officials. Anyway, so... So you get that warning. This warning gets on and then it turns out that the Israelis had unannounced been conducting an offensive on this ridge anyway. And then Friday, Israel's Defence Minister says we've actually captured it. So basically, why is this significant and why did Ali Taha Ridge become one of these places we talk about? Well, it's in southern Lebanon. I'm not going to try and pull up a map or anything, but it's about... We'll get one up on the screen. All right, it's 10 miles from the border. It's kind of south of Nabatiyah, if you know it, and near another place, Zortho al-Gabiya, which is a town the Israeli troops withdrew from in July in the US-brokered roadmap. Anyway, essentially, it's up to 600 metres high and it kind of runs along, kind of forms a bit of a wall. It became the demarcation between Nabatiyah to the north and the Israelis to the south. And so there's a front line. We were told that Hezbollah has tunnelled into this ridge and created what Hezbollah calls a facility. They didn't say what kind of facility. And other people, including Lebanese security officials and the Lebanese government, have been a little bit more expansive than that. They say it's a massive kind of weapons depot and command centre in the side. So it'd become this dividing point. It's got very commanding views of southern Lebanon. It's the kind of place that kind of harbours gravitate to, if you see what I mean, when you're fighting over... Like Beaufort Castle, the sort of strategic... Well, Beaufort Castle was one of the hilltops on the way back to this ridge, apparently. So when you're looking at the map, the reconquest of Beaufort Castle kind of makes sense because it's a stepping stone on the way to Ali Tahir Ridge. Ali Tahir Ridge makes sense because it's a stepping stone onto whatever it commands. A huge view. So in June, Israeli military officials were saying that Hezbollah was stuck underground without food or water there. And also in June, one Israeli soldier was reported killed and 13 wounded. During underground operations, apparently, around that ridge. So there's been a battle for a very long time. Israelcat says it has now been taken by the Israeli military. If that's true and Israelis have grabbed that, I can't help noticing the enormous Iranian retaliation against Israel has not materialised so far. But interesting to note, I think. I wonder if Netanyahu, and I'm speculating here, but Netanyahu was gambling that Iran might respond and that that might play into his favour. I mean, maybe that's very cynical, but it's quite a bold thing to do when you've had an Iranian threat. It would work for him to reignite the conflict at this stage. He's not doing well in the polls. The Israeli election is October 27th and nothing he seems to do seems to be pushing him back up. So, you know, if Iran started firing on Israel again, that's a threat to the homeland. It could give him something. I think it's not impossible that that played into the calculations. Yeah, I wonder if this reaches a big thing in Israel. I'm not pleased, and let us know. We'll ask Kenny Podkin and so on. It looks like, you know, it's a game, isn't it? It's a battlefield game. I don't know how much they can make of that and how much political capital he can turn that into. Interestingly, I saw that on Israeli public broadcaster Can, they were saying today that Israel is now considering withdrawing to a new security zone, occupied area in southern Lebanon, in order to reduce the troop presence following the seizure of this ridge. So maybe that was the sort of... Are they going to keep the ridge? I don't know if they're going to keep the ridge. It doesn't mention that, but it basically says that this new zone would be one to 2.5 miles into Lebanon versus the current one, which is more than six miles into Lebanon. So that's quite a significant withdrawal. The line is quite, we'll get a map up, but the line is quite sort of squiggly. It's jagged, isn't it? It's very jagged, yeah. It's sort of not supposed to go beyond the Litani River, but Ali al-Taha Ridge is well beyond the Litani River. So I don't know if they want, they're calling it the grey line, and apparently it includes establishing positions that would be used to launch operations inside Lebanese territory. So that suggests this will continue to be a permanent thing, but they want to scale it down a bit. Don't know how the Ali al-Taha Ridge plays into that. We'll look more into that this week. Yeah. So escalating the conflict in Lebanon, and we're also seeing an escalation of the conflict in Yemen. So this starts to get a bit knotty, and I do think this is, the Yemen civil war sounds like it's pretty much starting back up at this point, but there is an Iran link. Obviously Yemen's Houthis, often described as an Iranian proxy, although as we repeatedly say on this podcast, they normally have their own agendas, own domestic agendas for doing things, but they are certainly linked and backed by Iran. So today Yemen's Houthis have accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out airstrikes on various parts of Yemen, as they are pushing on with an offensive to seize territory bordering the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait. So there's been loads of fighting in Taiz province over the weekend, and this is right next to the Bab al-Mandab Strait on the Red Sea. It's in western Yemen. The Houthis are on the offensive? The Houthis are on the offensive. On the ground, to get to the coast? On the ground. To expand their foothold on the coast? To get to the coast. I mean, that's probably a little bit of a reach to try and get all the way down, but to try and cut off this key road, the al-Qadhaq road, which is a frontline. It links the cities of Taiz and the port of Mokka, which we've heard lots of fighting on there. Houthis have been bombing it repeatedly over the last few weeks, and if they manage to break through, it will cut off this government-held coastal belt near Bab al-Mandab. So they're trying to disrupt the government's control of that section. If they did capture this town, al-Qadhaq, it wouldn't have placed them directly at the strait, but it would have allowed them to threaten that key inland route that supports the Bab al-Mandab. So super interesting. I got that from Sheba Intelligence, which is an OSINT platform dedicated to Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab security. Also this morning, it's reported that Aramco, their Jizan oil refineries have been attacked again. This is a refinery, it's not too far from the Yemeni border, straight up the Red Sea coast. So yet another strike by the Houthis. I think you're right to call attention to it, that the war there has been heating up in dramatic fashion, and there's still this debate. You have these Yemen watchers and Yemeni officials who say, look, the war is back on big time. There's some other kind of expert spectators who I've spoken to who kind of go, is it? Not sure, but definitely a massive, massive escalation in Yemen at the moment. Let's leave it there for today. That's all the news. We'll be back again tomorrow. Until then, that was Around the Latest. Goodbye.