Iranian fishermen killed as Trump tears up Iran ceasefire
Iranian fishermen were killed as Washington tore up its ceasefire, and the Hormuz standoff triggered by the escalation is now driving up British fuel bills.
Omid Arabi was 26. Morteza Hormozi was 25. Both were fishermen from Bandar Kohastak, on Iran’s southern coast, and both were killed when a US strike hit the fishing pier at Sirik earlier this month. The week Washington declared its own ceasefire “over” and struck 140 targets inside Iran, the Strait of Hormuz standoff that followed began pushing fuel prices up at British forecourts.
Iran’s health ministry counted at least 14 people killed and 78 injured across five provinces over two days of strikes. At the Sirik pier alone, three fishermen died and 15 were wounded; around 30 boats were destroyed at the nearby Panj-Peleh pier in Bandar Abbas. A telecoms maintenance worker was killed on Farur Island. Iran’s foreign ministry called the strikes “a grave war crime.” The names and details come from Iranian state media, relayed through independent outlets; where they cannot be independently verified, they are reported as identified by that source.
The ceasefire Washington broke
Donald Trump opened this war on 28 February. A ceasefire and a memorandum of understanding, signed with Iran in mid-June, was meant to end it. On 12 and 13 July, US Central Command announced it had struck 140 targets across Iran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard retaliated against US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Oman. Trump declared the ceasefire over.
“Iran is not going to capitulate,” the journalist Jeremy Scahill told Democracy Now on 13 July, reporting for Drop Site News. That single line is the honest summary of where this war now stands. Two rounds of American strikes, a revoked oil waiver and a threatened new bombardment have not produced an Iranian climbdown. They have produced a closed Strait of Hormuz, a spike in the oil price, and a British driver paying more to fill the tank.
Who broke the agreement
The memorandum Iran signed with Washington in June gave Tehran managing authority over the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days, with a longer-term arrangement to be settled bilaterally between Iran and Oman. The United States, according to Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, then tried to build a parallel safe-passage corridor with Oman that would have sidestepped Iranian authority altogether. That effort “did not materialise because of overt and covert US pressure on Oman,” Baghaei said. Washington also revoked Iran’s temporary oil-sales waiver, bringing the deadline forward from 21 August to 17 July.
Put plainly: it is the United States, not Iran, that is straining an agreement it signed weeks ago. Iran has responded by declaring the Strait closed “until further notice” and requiring commercial vessels to coordinate passage with Iranian authorities, and has warned it will close Hormuz completely and strike “at a ratio of at least two to one” if attacked again. Iranian forces have also struck commercial vessels, including a Cyprus-flagged container ship, in the course of this standoff. That is a real fact and this piece does not pretend otherwise. But it happened inside a war Washington restarted, against a deal Washington was already hollowing out, not as an unprovoked act against neutral shipping.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade. The maritime intelligence firm tracking the route has raised its threat assessment to “severe.” One energy analyst told Al Jazeera that passage through the Strait could stay below half of pre-war levels “for many months, with periodic flare-ups.” Every one of those flare-ups now has a price tag attached in Britain.
The British pump pays for someone else’s war
Brent crude rose 3.4% to almost $79 a barrel on the news of the renewed closure. UK petrol prices, which had been drifting down to 150.59p a litre on 6 July, turned back up to around 151.19p; diesel sits near 164.85p. Both remain below April’s wartime peak of 159.53p for petrol and 191.54p for diesel, but the direction has reversed, and it is reversing for the same reason it rose the first time: a war in the Gulf that British households did not choose and cannot end.
“The fate of pump prices here in the UK once again rests on whether there are further attacks between the US and Iran,” said Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC, warning drivers heading off on summer holidays to expect a further rise of a couple of pence a litre in the coming week. Luke Bosdet of the AA put it more starkly: drivers across the country “now face new increases heading towards the start of the summer holidays.”
This is not an abstract market wobble. The Bank of England has already held interest rates at 3.75% this year with the war cited as a driver of inflation forecast at 3 to 3.5% through the summer. The energy price cap climbed toward £1,973 for a typical household, roughly a fifth higher than it was in the spring, as the same barrel of oil that funds this war works its way into gas and electricity bills. At April’s peak, a barrel of oil cost $42 more than it did the day before the war began, a 57% jump absorbed almost entirely by people who had no say in starting it.
Two fishermen from Bandar Kohastak will not be going home. A family in Britain filling up before a summer holiday will pay more than they did a fortnight ago. Both bills were run up in Washington.
