Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said early Thursday that it had struck or disabled seven oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz overnight, calling it the single biggest one-day toll in the waterway since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on February 28. The claim could not be independently verified, and U.S. officials immediately disputed it.

According to the IRGC's own account, four tankers transferring oil ship-to-ship inside the Persian Gulf were set ablaze in coordinated strikes, while three more vessels were disabled after striking sea mines elsewhere in the strait. The statement gave no casualty figures and did not identify the ships' flags or owners, and Al Jazeera, reporting from Tehran, said the claims have not been confirmed by any independent source.

The Strait of Hormuz normally carries about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, and Thursday's claims land five months into a shooting war that has repeatedly spilled into the shipping lane. The fighting began February 28, when the U.S. and Israel struck Iranian targets, and Brent crude has swung wildly on every subsequent flare-up, briefly topping $120 a barrel earlier in the war before U.S. strikes and a declared blockade tried to stabilize the lane.

Washington Pushes Back

President Trump dismissed the new claims outright. "They are making up fake hits, mines, and everything else," he wrote on Truth Social, arguing Iran is "doing everything they can to drive up the price of oil" ahead of next month's midterm elections. A U.S. Central Command spokesperson, speaking anonymously to reporters tracking the war's live developments, went further, saying American forces have cleared the shipping lanes and that roughly 95% of vessels are still getting through the strait — and cast Iran's claims as a sign of "desperation" under the U.S.-enforced blockade.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard, for its part, warned Washington against intervening further. "The U.S. military must know that if this trend continues, the conflict will extend to its bases in the region," the IRGC said in its statement — an explicit threat against American installations across the Middle East if U.S. forces move to protect tankers elsewhere in the strait.

"STRIKING IRAN DOES NOT APPEAR TO SERVE ANY REPUBLICAN INTERESTS."

That assessment, attributed to a White House correspondent tracking the standoff, captures the bind Trump finds himself in: continued fighting keeps oil prices elevated just as voters head to the polls, but any sign of U.S. retreat in the strait would hand Tehran a propaganda win it could use to claim victory over the blockade.

Neither side showed signs of backing down Thursday. Gulf shipping insurers have raised premiums on strait transits multiple times since February, and energy traders are now watching for the kind of independent confirmation — satellite imagery, an insurer's claim filing, or a flagged vessel's own distress call — that would settle whether Thursday's reported strikes actually happened, or whether, as Washington insists, they were invented.