United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that the US military’s core strategic objectives in Iran are nearing completion.

“We’re going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast,” Trump said in a televised address, adding that the US will hit Iran “very hard” in the next two to three weeks.

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

  • Trump described the spike in domestic gasoline prices in the US as a “short-term increase” caused by Iran “launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers in neighbouring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict”. The Strait of Hormuz will open up naturally because Iran would want to sell oil, he said.
  • Trump repeated his calls for other countries to reclaim access to the strait, which has been effectively blocked by Tehran since the conflict started.
  • The US president said that Washington will not allow its allies in West Asia such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates get hurt.
  • Trump claimed that the Iranian Navy was “gone” and that the country’s overall military capabilities had diminished. “Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces – very few of them left,” he said.
  • Reacting to Trump’s comments, Tehran said that the US and Israel’s understanding of Iran’s military capabilities is incomplete. “Your information about our military power and equipment is incomplete,” Al Jazeera quoted a spokesperson as saying in a statement published by news agency Tasnim. “You know nothing about our vast and strategic capabilities.”
  • Following Trump’s comments the price of benchmark Brent crude spiked to nearly $105 per barrel on Thursday from what was about $100 per barrel minutes before the address. The price was $78 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict started.
  • Major Asian stock indices fell on Thursday. At 8.30 Indian time, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1%, South Korea’s Kospi crashed 3.8%, Japan’s Nikkei 1.8% and China’s Shanghai Composite 0.3%.
  • In an open letter, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday urged the public in the US to look beyond “distortions and manufactured narratives” and ask whose interests was being served by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
  • The US Central Command said on Wednesday that it had struck 12,300 targets in Iran since the war started. More than 150 Iranian vessels were damaged or destroyed, it added.

The conflict

The US and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran’s action posed an existential threat to Israel. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security. Iran has retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region and targeting major cities in Gulf countries.

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

Israel has been claiming that Iran is close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, which could alter the regional security balance. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.