The United States and Iran exchanged strikes for a seventh consecutive night into Saturday, with both militaries expanding their target sets to include bridges, desalination plants and power stations. US Central Command said its forces had struck surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities, describing the operations as designed to “continue degrading Iranian military capabilities”. Iranian state media reported that American missiles hit a desalination facility in Jask county, cutting drinking water to some 10,000 people across 20 villages, and damaged at least five bridges and a railway station in Hormozgan province. Kuwait’s electricity ministry confirmed that an Iranian attack caused a fire at a power generation and water desalination plant, the second such strike in two days, while Bahrain’s interior ministry said air-raid sirens sounded five times and its defence forces intercepted multiple aerial assaults.

Viewed from Washington, the escalation follows President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to hit Iranian infrastructure unless Tehran returns to negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz. US officials, speaking to American media, said the strikes on bridges and logistical nodes were intended to isolate the key port of Bandar Abbas and pressure Iran’s leadership. The White House maintained that all targets were military in nature, though the UN secretary-general expressed deep concern over “attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran and across the region”. In Tehran, senior military adviser Mohsen Rezaei warned that if US strikes continue for another two or three days, Iran will “no longer limit itself to retaliatory, like-for-like responses” and will launch “full-scale offensive operations” in which “no political border will be safe”.

The widening scope of attacks is drawing Gulf states deeper into the conflict. Kuwait’s foreign ministry condemned what it called a “systematic aggressive approach” targeting vital civilian facilities and reserved the right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Jordan’s military said it shot down ten Iranian missiles without casualties, while Saudi Arabia briefly issued civil-defence alerts for Yanbu and Al-Kharj. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed to have struck a US drone depot and an artificial-intelligence centre in Bahrain, as well as fuel storage and ammunition sites at American bases in Kuwait and Jordan. The US military dismissed as false an Iranian report that two oil tankers had exploded after hitting mines in a US-controlled route through the Strait of Hormuz, and said its naval blockade had redirected four commercial vessels.

The renewed fighting has effectively paralysed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas supplies normally transit. Maritime tracking data showed traffic at a three-week low, and benchmark crude prices rose more than 4% on Friday to their highest level in over a month. The war began on 28 February with US-Israeli strikes on Iran, and a preliminary ceasefire deal brokered in June has now collapsed. Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan have attempted to revive talks, but both Washington and Tehran, according to analysts in Paris, perceive any compromise as a form of capitulation. The UN Security Council is expected to discuss the deteriorating situation in the coming days.