CENTCOM hit roughly 140 Iranian military targets overnight Saturday into Sunday — missile and drone sites, naval assets, ammunition depots, coastal surveillance posts — the third round of U.S. strikes on Iran in a single week, pushing the week's cumulative total past 300. The trigger was the same one behind the last two rounds: Iran's Revolutionary Guard hit a container ship, the Cyprus-flagged M/V GFS Galaxy, while it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz, setting it ablaze and forcing the crew onto a lifeboat. Iran fired back at Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman and Jordan — including a strike on Jordan's Prince Hassan Air Base — and declared the strait closed “until further notice.” Oil didn't wait for the dust to settle. Brent crude closed the week near $76 a barrel, about 5% above where it was trading before the war started in February, according to Kpler data cited by The New York Times.
What the numbers show
CENTCOM's own numbers track a week that kept escalating. Tuesday's round hit about 80 Iranian targets. Wednesday's hit roughly 90. Saturday night's hit around 140 — the largest single round yet, spanning the categories CENTCOM listed in its own statement on X: drone and missile depots, naval assets, communications infrastructure and coastal radar posts. Separately, the U.S. Treasury revoked the temporary waiver that had let Iran sell oil on the open market, cutting off new transactions after July 17. Shipping data shows what that's doing on the water: daily traffic through the strait — a corridor that normally carries a fifth of the world's oil — dropped to just 22 vessels by Thursday, down from more than 130 before the war, per Kpler figures reported by The New York Times. The backlog of ships waiting outside the strait to transit has fallen below 700.
| Date | Round | Targets hit (CENTCOM) |
|---|---|---|
| July 7 | 1st | ~80 |
| July 8 | 2nd | ~90 |
| July 11 | 3rd | ~140 |
| Week total | — | 300+ |
What officials are saying
CENTCOM posted the strike details directly to X within hours of completing the round, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added his own line minutes later:
Why this matters for freelancers
A Brent price stuck near $76 doesn't just show up at the pump — it shows up in the inflation numbers the Fed is watching. Headline CPI was already running at 4.2% over the year through May, the largest 12-month jump since April 2023. J.P. Morgan's mid-year outlook, published days before this latest round of strikes, raised its year-end core PCE forecast to 3.4% from 2.9%, and named the reason directly: a supply shock in oil, gas, fertilizer and helium tied to the Strait of Hormuz. That lands on top of a Fed that's already in no rush to cut. New Chair Kevin Warsh held the target rate at 3.50%–3.75% at his first meeting in June, on a 12–0 vote, and struck a tone bond markets read as hawkish — futures are now pricing at least one more hike this year, not a cut. For anyone billing in dollars, that's a squeeze from both sides: higher fuel and input costs, with no relief coming on financing or credit.
Context: how we got here
This didn't start this week. The U.S. and Israel began striking Iran on February 28, and a 60-day memorandum of understanding signed in mid-June was supposed to wind the war down while technical talks worked out the details — centrally, unrestricted passage through Hormuz. It hasn't held. Trump declared the ceasefire “over” on July 8, speaking from the NATO summit in Ankara, after Iran hit vessels earlier that week. Every round since has followed the same sequence: Iran hits a ship, the U.S. hits back, Iran fires at a Gulf base, and oil jumps. Daniel Sternoff, a senior fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, put it plainly to The New York Times — Iran wants nothing moving through the route the U.S. military has been escorting ships along near Oman's coast, and so far it hasn't managed to stop all of it.
What comes next
Oman has drafted a proposal to manage traffic through the strait, and its foreign minister met with Iran's Abbas Araghchi over the weekend to discuss it — but Iran still hasn't said publicly that the strait is open to everyone, which is the one commitment Washington says it needs before broader talks resume. The 60-day ceasefire window from June's memorandum runs out in mid-August. Until then, the pattern from this past week is the closest thing to a forecast anyone has: an attack on shipping, U.S. strikes, Iranian retaliation against a Gulf state, and a jump in Brent. Nobody involved has said this ends before that deadline.
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