Al Jazeera reported from Tehran on June 28 that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had fired missiles and drones towards the US Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait and the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain after a second day of American strikes. US Central Command said its aircraft had struck Iranian military surveillance infrastructure, communications systems, air-defence sites, drone storage facilities and minelayer capabilities after a Panama-flagged tanker, the Kiku, was hit near the Strait of Hormuz.
That sequence matters because it moves the dispute beyond a maritime-management argument. Article 5 of the memorandum, as reported by Al Jazeera, calls for Iran to use its best efforts to secure free commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days, remove technical and military obstacles and conduct talks with Oman and other Gulf states over future administration of the strait. The legal and diplomatic language is narrow; the military consequences are not.
CENTCOM said on June 26 that US aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites after a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, was hit by a one-way attack drone while exiting the strait along the Omani coast. A day later, CENTCOM said Iran had been given a chance to honour the ceasefire but had instead launched a one-way attack drone that hit the Kiku at 4:30am ET while it was carrying more than two million barrels of crude.
Iran has presented the same facts through a different frame. Al Jazeera reported that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said during a visit to Baghdad that the Strait of Hormuz remained under Iran's oversight and management for the next 30 days while obstacles were removed. Iran's foreign ministry, according to Al Jazeera, called the US strikes a breach of the UN Charter and of the memorandum's first paragraph. The IRGC, also cited by Al Jazeera, said the agreement gave Tehran control over ships transiting the strait.
The argument is therefore not just over whether two ships were struck. It is over who gets to turn a ceasefire clause into operational control. Washington's reading is that safe passage means US-backed coordination for commercial traffic, including routing close to Oman. Tehran's reading, as described by Iranian officials and analysts cited by Al Jazeera, is that the memorandum recognises an Iranian role in managing the reopening of the waterway.
The commercial signal has already weakened. Al Jazeera, citing maritime-traffic monitor Windward AI, reported that traffic dropped from 70 transits on Wednesday to 54 on Thursday and 40 on Saturday after the threats and attacks.