For the fifth consecutive day, US forces struck targets inside Iran on Wednesday, this time hitting military sites in the country’s north that US Central Command described as among the closest yet to Tehran. CENTCOM said the strikes aimed at further degrading Iran’s capacity to threaten commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Al Jazeera’s live reporting from Wednesday morning covers the latest wave.
On Tuesday, US forces disabled the Curaçao-flagged commercial vessel Belma after it ignored multiple warnings and attempted to reach Kharg Island in violation of the US naval blockade, which was reimposed Monday. A Navy aircraft fired Hellfire missiles into the ship’s smokestack, disabling the vessel without sinking it. No crew casualties were reported. The Belma was the first vessel disabled under the renewed blockade. The Hill reported on the operation.
Iran escalated on Wednesday in two directions at once. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a formal warning that it would shut off all energy exports from the Middle East: “The export of oil and gas from the region will be either for everyone or for no one.” And Al Jazeera reported Wednesday morning that Iranian forces had struck targets in Kuwait and Jordan again, a day after the IRGC’s Operation Nasr-2 struck a Kuwaiti missile base, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet command center in Bahrain, and a US air base in Jordan. If confirmed, Wednesday’s strikes mark the second consecutive day Iran has attacked US partner states beyond the strait. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf told state media Iran was fighting an “existential” battle and was prepared for broader confrontation.
The IRGC’s threat to halt all regional energy exports isn’t idle posturing. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 20 percent of global oil trade. A sustained interruption wouldn’t affect only Iranian exports; it would constrain shipments from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq as well. Brent crude has climbed since the blockade was reimposed Monday. Global energy markets are watching Kuwait and Jordan as much as they’re watching Tehran. If Iran follows through on the threat, the economic consequences would extend well beyond the parties to this conflict.
Against that backdrop, President Trump announced Wednesday that Iran had released Dena Karari, an American citizen he said had been wrongfully jailed in Iran since December 2024. “We appreciate this gesture of Goodwill by Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. ABC News reported on the release. Qatari and Pakistani mediators remain active in Tehran, trying to find a framework that neither side has formally agreed to pursue.
The five-day campaign has covered a great deal of ground quickly. What hasn’t happened before, in any prior American military engagement with Iran, provides the clearest measure of how far this has gone. Operation Praying Mantis, in April 1988, was the largest American naval surface battle since World War II, and it destroyed roughly half of Iran’s operational navy in a single day. But it struck Iranian warships and offshore oil platforms at sea. The US didn’t strike the Iranian mainland. The 1980 hostage rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, entered Iranian airspace and ended in catastrophe in the desert before reaching Tehran. In 2020, the United States killed Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport, which isn’t Iranian soil. Military exchanges between US and Iranian-backed groups in Syria and Iraq have continued for years. But strikes targeting Iranian military sites close to Tehran, from the air, sustained over five days, with strikes working progressively northward toward the capital: that’s something genuinely different. CNN has been tracking the geography of the strikes. What the historical record tells us about what Iran does in response to this level of direct military pressure remains to be seen.
The death toll from Venezuela’s June 24 twin earthquakes has reached 4,490, according to Venezuelan officials, with more than 16,700 people injured and nearly 18,000 displaced. The Global Nation Inquirer has the current figures. International rescue teams from more than twenty countries remain in the field alongside Venezuelan emergency personnel, a coordinated response that has proceeded with fewer political complications than international aid to Venezuela has sometimes faced in the past.
The US Geological Survey has estimated that the final toll could ultimately fall between 10,000 and 100,000, given the scale of structural damage across the coastal communities hit hardest by the quakes. The earthquakes measured magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5. The gap between the confirmed toll and the USGS’s upper estimate reflects both the ongoing search and rescue operation and the difficulty of accounting for population in areas where infrastructure collapsed entirely. Three weeks out, communities in the affected region are past the search phase and into the longer, harder work of rebuilding.
A second dangerous heat event is building across the eastern United States this week, with forecasters placing roughly 100 million Americans under heat alerts, according to ABC News. The new alerts come as New Jersey is still accounting for the dead from the July 4 heat dome that killed at least 29 people across at least ten counties, most of them found in homes without air conditioning. WHYY reported on the New Jersey deaths.
No federal major disaster declaration has been issued for either event, and the structure of the law makes one difficult. The Stafford Act, which governs federal disaster relief, defines qualifying disasters primarily around events that cause measurable property and infrastructure damage: hurricanes, floods, tornadoes. Extreme heat kills people rather than destroying buildings, and the statutory language doesn’t include human death as a triggering category of damage. Every past presidential request for a Stafford Act declaration specifically citing extreme heat has been denied, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Medical Daily examined the federal gap.
Legislation to close the gap has been pending since October 2025. The Extreme Heat Emergency Act, introduced with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, would amend the Stafford Act to explicitly include extreme heat as a qualifying event. As of Wednesday, it hadn’t advanced to a floor vote in either chamber.
Extreme heat already kills more Americans in an average year than any other weather-related cause, more than hurricanes, more than tornadoes, more than floods. The deaths tend to happen one at a time, in apartments and houses without air conditioning, and they don’t produce the visible structural damage that triggers news coverage and federal response mechanisms. The Stafford Act was shaped around the disasters that leave wreckage behind. A policy built around wreckage doesn’t capture this. In the meantime, a second heat event is building on top of one that already killed nearly thirty people, and the legal apparatus for federal disaster response doesn’t cover either one.
The wildfire in the Fontainebleau Forest has now burned more than 2,000 hectares, according to French authorities, up from the 1,900 hectares reported Monday. France 24 has updated the scope of the damage. The forest, a UNESCO biosphere reserve roughly 60 kilometers south of Paris, has had the blaze “contained” since Tuesday evening, but authorities said sections of the forest remain active. Eight hundred fifty firefighters and six aircraft are still deployed.
Investigators have arrested several people in connection with the fires. A local volunteer firefighter confessed to deliberately setting one of the blazes using a lighter and an accelerant. A second person admitted to accidentally starting another fire by discarding a cigarette. US News & World Report covered the arrests. The forest is one of the oldest protected landscapes in Europe. French kings hunted there for centuries, and in the 1830s and 1840s a group of painters who became known as the Barbizon school moved to the villages at its edge and began painting the light through the oaks and birches in ways that influenced French landscape painting for a generation. The forest was protected by imperial decree well before the modern conservation movement existed. It hasn’t burned at anything close to this scale in the modern record, and it won’t look the same for a long time.
In the Ideas section, Bob Whitfield’s The Verdict Stands is worth reading this week alongside any story about international institutions under pressure. He writes about the Srebrenica genocide ruling at thirty-one years, and what it means for a verdict to endure when enforcement is uncertain.
The World Cup final is set. Argentina defeated England 2-1 Tuesday in the second semifinal. Spain had beaten France 2-0 Monday, with Mikel Oyarzabal scoring on a penalty in the 22nd minute and Pedro Porro adding the second in the 58th. Al Jazeera covered Spain’s win.
The final is Sunday, July 19, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, at 3 p.m. Eastern. NBC New York has the details. It’s the first World Cup final ever played between Spain and Argentina. Spain last won the title in 2010, in South Africa. Argentina won in 2022, in Qatar. A second consecutive championship for Argentina would make it the first country to win back-to-back World Cups since Brazil took both in 1958 and 1962. MetLife Stadium holds 82,500 people. Sunday should be worth watching.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
