US PRESIDENT Donald Trump said Friday that the United States had heavily bombed military targets on Iran's oil hub Kharg Island and the US Navy would soon begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.
Several top Iranian officials joined a defiant pro-government rally in Tehran, meanwhile, marching alongside demonstrators waving banners reading "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
As the United States intensified its bombing of Iran, Tehran launched a new wave of drone and missile attacks on Israel and its Gulf neighbors.
The war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon continued to rage and the Lebanese health ministry said an Israeli strike on a primary health care center in southern Lebanon had killed at least 12 medical personnel on Friday.
According to the Lebanese authorities, at least 773 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Lebanon aimed at wiping out Iranian ally Hezbollah.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said military targets on Kharg Island, which handles almost all of Iran's crude exports, had been "totally obliterated" in "one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East."
He said he had chosen not to target oil infrastructure on the island for now.
"However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision," the US president said.
With oil prices spiking, Trump was asked when the US Navy would begin escorting tankers through the Gulf's critical Strait of Hormuz. "It'll happen soon, very soon," he said.
The United States and Israel have tread carefully around Kharg Island until now, but US officials have been reported as saying that capturing the island was potentially on the table.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported on Friday that the Pentagon had dispatched the Japan-based amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli to the region along with its complement of some 2,500 Marines.
Heavy blasts shook Tehran late Friday after the United States vowed to step up air strikes and Iranian state media said a fresh round of missiles had been launched toward Israel. Israeli rescue workers said no casualties were reported.
Blasts were heard in Doha early Saturday and Qatar's defense ministry said its military had intercepted missiles targeting the Gulf state.
Saudi Arabia's defense ministry said its forces had intercepted dozens of drones on Friday and Turkey said NATO forces shot down a ballistic missile launched from Iran — the third such interception in the war.
The Islamic republic is intent on showing it will come through the war intact and in control, despite its supreme leader Ali Khamenei being killed at the start of the US-Israeli campaign on Feb. 28.
Khamenei's son Mojtaba Khamenei was named the new supreme leader, but has been absent from public view and is said to be wounded.
The US government unveiled a $10-million reward for information about Mojtaba Khamenei's whereabouts.
$100 a barrel
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a news conference the US military would bombard Iran more heavily on Friday than any other day so far in the war.
According to the Pentagon, the US and Israel have struck more than 15,000 targets in Iran over the past two weeks.
Israel's military said it conducted 7,600 strikes on the country, most of them against its missile program.
The conflict has sparked chaos in global markets and sent oil prices soaring.
Brent contracts for a barrel of crude have soared more than 42 percent, leaving markets and governments everywhere skittish about energy supply and higher inflation. On Friday, oil stayed above $100 a barrel.
Within Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have warned of an even stronger response to any anti-government protests, after ones in January in which several thousand people were killed.
Iranian authorities have maintained an internet blackout since the war started.
Iranians speaking to AFP under cover of anonymity have described a grim picture of cities in ruins and cash running short.
A woman in Kermanshah, western Iran, told AFP that "countless" people from Tehran had come to seek refuge from the air strikes, adding to demand for food and scarce medicine, with prices "nearly doubling."
The UN refugee agency has estimated that up to 3.2 million people have been displaced inside Iran since the war started.
Iran's health ministry said on March 8 that more than 1,200 people have been killed, a figure AFP has not been able to verify independently.
The US military has lost 13 personnel since the war started — including six members of a refueling aircraft that crashed in Iraq after an incident officials said was not caused by hostile fire.
Iran’s biggest weapon
Long before the US and Israel attacked Iran, the Islamic Republic had devised its own weapon: holding the world’s main oil lifeline hostage to offset its foes' military superiority, three regional sources familiar with Iranian planning said.
For decades Iran has signaled that if pushed into a confrontation, it would restrict tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point where its adversaries are most exposed because disruptions there reverberate instantly through global energy markets.
With the Gulf’s main export artery in the crosshairs, Tehran has turned the region’s greatest economic asset into its most powerful deterrent, the sources said.
About a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes through the vital Strait, and Iran, which lies on its northern coast, has now effectively closed it.
Traffic via the strait has dropped by 97 percent since the war against Iran began on Feb. 28, according to United Nations data.
Iran has used similar tactics before. In the “Tanker War” of the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq conflict, attacks on vessels turned the Gulf into one of the world’s most dangerous waterways, forcing Washington to escort tankers through the strait.
But Iran now wields far more potent tools, including large arsenals of cheap missiles and drones capable of threatening shipping across a far wider area. Its attacks this month have shown how quickly Tehran can disrupt traffic through the strait without heavily mining it.
Trump will blink first
"Iran is outgunned — there is no way it can defeat them in a direct confrontation,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director.
Anticipating further US-Israeli strikes after a 12-day war in June last year, Tehran examined how to extend any conflict “in time and space.”
“If Iran takes the global economy hostage, Trump would blink first,” added Vaez.
The regional sources, who declined to be identified as they were not authorized to speak publicly, said Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had long prepared for a showdown with Israel and Washington.
The Guards' plan, which seeks to protect Iran's 47-year-old system of rule by fiercely anti-Western Islamic clerics, was activated on Feb. 28, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the conflict.
The core of the strategy is a recognition of Iran’s military limits against superior forces, the sources said.
Tehran’s planners instead seek to pressure oil flows while inflicting asymmetric attacks on US assets stationed across the region.
The strategy seeks to conjure economic pressures — both at home and overseas — on President Donald Trump to halt the war.
"This is asymmetric warfare par excellence, in which Iran achieves outsized, even global effects through a small number of attacks that impose painful costs,” said Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute.
“The goal is to create economic pain, further undermining support for the war in the United States and increasing pressure on Washington to end it.”
Rather than concentrate forces on a single battlefield, Tehran is dispersing its campaign with waves of low-cost missile and drone strikes across the Gulf, of the kind once outsourced to Iran-allied forces in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.
The approach reflects a doctrine shaped over decades by the IRGC, built on the assumption that a stronger foe would try to decapitate Iran’s leadership and command structure at the outset of any war, the sources said.
The Guards are applying lessons from years of shadow conflict with the US, they said. But this time, instead of relying mostly on regional proxies that once formed its forward line of defense, Tehran is now executing the playbook itself.
Wishful thinking
Ali Vaez said the US had entered the war unprepared, driven by “a lot of wishful thinking and not a lot of well-thought-through strategies.”
Washington, he said, failed to anticipate drone attacks on Gulf states, disruptions to shipping lanes or the need to evacuate citizens, shortcomings he said reflected a failure to absorb lessons from the risk of drones in modern warfare.
By contrast, Iran’s decentralized “Mosaic” doctrine — dispersing command and control to withstand decapitation — remains in place, under one coordinating hub.
Even after Khamenei's death, two sources said Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Guards commander, and Ali Larijani, head of Iran's national security council, continued to direct the war effort from Tehran.
Vaez argued that while the US can significantly weaken Iran, total defeat would need a land invasion involving up to a million troops operating in unforgiving terrain, a commitment Washington has shown “it doesn’t have the stomach for.”
Trump, who once promised to keep the US out of "stupid” military interventions, is now pursuing what many experts see as an open-ended war of choice that could be the biggest military campaign since those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran’s immediate objective is survival, Vaez said. Beyond that, its broader aim is to force Washington to accept that coercion, whether through military force, economic pressure or diplomatic isolation, does not work.
Whether such a lesson is learned remains uncertain. But by weaponizing the world’s most critical energy corridor and stretching the battlefield far beyond Iran’s borders, Tehran is betting it can endure longer than a far stronger enemy.