United States President Donald Trump on Saturday said that American forces will strike targets on Iran’s key oil export hub Kharg Island “just for fun” amid escalating tensions in West Asia, NBC News reported.

Trump said that American strikes on Friday “totally demolished” much of the island’s military infrastructure but deliberately avoided damaging oil facilities that handle most of Iran’s crude exports.

The island is an 8-km stretch of land off the Iranian coast that handles about 90% of the country’s crude exports.

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Here are more top updates from the conflict in West Asia:

  • The US president also said Iranian officials have quietly reached out seeking a deal to end the war but insisted he was not ready to agree to a ceasefire yet. “Iran wants to make a deal, and I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet,” Trump told NBC News.
  • When asked about favourable terms, Trump said any deal would require Iran to completely abandon its nuclear ambitions, though he declined to specify the conditions publicly.
  • In an interview on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Arabic-language news outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that the conflict will end only when Tehran is certain that it will not resume and when reparations are paid. “We experienced this last year [in June]: Israel attacked, then the United States...they regrouped and attacked us again,” Araghchi was quoted as saying.
  • Lebanon’s health ministry said that 850 persons had been killed and more than 2,100 injured in nearly two weeks of attacks by Israel, Al Jazeera reported.
  • On Saturday, the deputy governor of Bushehr, a port city close to Kharg island, said that oil exports from the hub are “fully under way”, adding that operations of oil companies at the site are “proceeding normally”, Iranian state-backed Fars news ​agency reported.
  • On Saturday, Araghchi alleged that the US launched strikes on Kharg Island and Abu Musa from two locations in the United Arab Emirates – Ras Al Khaimah and an area “very close to Dubai”, MS News reported. “It is clear that they are fired from UAE,” he said, adding it was “dangerous” to “use highly populated areas to launch, you know, rockets against us”.
  • On Saturday, Tehran urged civilians to evacuate West Asia’s busiest port, Jebel Ali in Dubai and two other UAE ports – Khalifa in Abu Dhabi and Fujairah – claiming the US used “ports, docks and hideouts” in the UAE to strike Kharg Island, AP reported. This marked the first time Iran openly threatened a neighboring country’s non-US assets.
  • Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Sunday vowed to “pursue and kill” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, AFP reported. “If this child-killing criminal is alive, we will continue to pursue and kill him with full force,” the Guards said in a statement published on their Sepah News website.
  • Japan on Sunday said that the threshold is “extremely high” for sending warships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, with ruling party policy chief Takayuki Kobayashi saying any deployment would need to be considered “with great caution” under Japan’s laws, Channel News Asia reported. 
  • This came a day after Trump urged other countries to send warships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz amid the conflict in West Asia.

The conflict

The conflict in West Asia began on February 28 after Israel and the US launched a joint operation to “degrade the capabilities” of the Iranian government.

Tehran retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region, and targeting major cities in other Gulf countries and some ships.

The joint attacks by Israel and the US on Iran came amid tensions between the three countries over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security. Israel has been claiming that Iran is close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, which could alter the regional security balance.

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Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

The International Energy Agency on Thursday said that the fighting has caused the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.

Global oil prices have surged since the conflict began. The benchmark Brent crude oil price has crossed the $100 per barrel-mark. The price was about $72.8 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict began.

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