A ship was struck in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, killing one person and injuring three, local Iranian authorities said, as Tehran and Washington clash over the strategic waterway.
“A merchant vessel was struck around 5am this morning off the coasts of Hengam and Qeshm islands. One person was killed and three others were injured,” Qeshm city governor Amir Teymouri said, according to state TV, without specifying the origin of the strike.
Several explosions were reported overnight around Qeshm, the largest island in the Hormuz strait.
The deadly incident comes a day before a meeting between Iran and Gulf states in Oman, which also borders the strait, over the blockaded route crucial for global oil and gas trade.
Control over the strait has become a major flashpoint in the conflict between Iran and the United States in their six-month war.
In retaliation for attacks by the United States and Israel that started the war on February 28, Iran has blocked the waterway, a passage that was previously free and unobstructed before the conflict began.
Iran now requires vessels to obtain authorisation to pass through the strait, citing security and sovereignty concerns, and is considering a mechanism to impose service fees.
Vessels that fail to comply are frequently targeted by Iranian strikes, while the United States sporadically bombs the Iranian coast in a bid to challenge Tehran’s control of the strait.
Houthis hit Saudi base
Separately, Houthi fighters on Sunday claimed they used drones and missiles to attack a military base in southern Saudi Arabia as renewed fighting with Yemen’s government forces forced growing numbers of civilians to flee.
The attack at the southern Sharurah base targeted “weapons depots and command and control centres”, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree wrote on X.
The date of the operation was not specified.
Clashes have increased this week between Houthis and Yemeni government forces, which are backed by Riyadh.
On Saturday, the government forces said they had struck Houthi fighters in the Red Sea city of Mocha, and later attacked other Houthi positions in the southwestern part of the country.
“Air Force of the Armed Forces targeted positions and barracks of the terrorist Houthi group with three airstrikes” in the Taiz region, the Yemeni military said Sunday in a post on X.
US news site Axios also reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman twice called US President Donald Trump to request strikes on the Houthis last week, but that the request was rejected.
Trump on Saturday acknowledged speaking to the de facto Saudi leader but said the Houthis had also “called us and they don’t want to fight with us”.
He did not elaborate on whether Washington would take any action, but told reporters that “everything’s gonna work out fine and dandy” in the region.
In 2025, the United States conducted a seven-week bombing campaign against the Houthis in response to their repeated attacks on Red Sea shipping in support of Hamas during the Israeli assault on Gaza. That ended with a ceasefire.
The ongoing clashes follow a week-long Houthi offensive that culminated in the group capturing the remainder of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and several strategic islands, cementing their hold on the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the sea’s southern entrance.
The waterway has become an important artery for Saudi Arabian oil exports after Iran largely cut off shipments through the Gulf with its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the Middle East war.
The Houthis have recently declared their own maritime blockade of Riyadh’s Red Sea ports.
The government news agency Saba reported on Saturday that Yemeni “forces destroyed vehicles and weapons and killed members of the Houthi terrorist militia” near the port of Mocha, and quoted a spokesman for the forces as saying they had also struck Houthi targets just outside the city.
The Houthis, meanwhile, reported on Saturday evening that over the past 48 hours, Saudi aircraft conducted “129 airstrikes” on areas under their control.
On Saturday night, Saudi authorities said a Houthi projectile fell in an area near the border, hours after issuing alerts warning of the risk of possible attacks.
The civil defence directorate said the incident resulted “in two injuries and material damage to a mosque, several buildings, and vehicles”.
Yemen’s civil war, which began in 2014 with the Houthi capture of the capital Sanaa, had been dormant since a ceasefire in 2022 but roared back to life in July. It has uprooted millions of people, and the latest fighting has led even more to flee their homes.
The fall of Mocha to the Houthis on Thursday drove many residents to Aden, where the internationally recognised government is based.
One of the displaced, Abdulali al-Rajihi, said the Houthis “told us: ‘Leave, scatter, you have half an hour’”.
“We fled wearing the clothes on our backs. And we took our children, as much as we could manage.”
Saddam Ali escaped from Al-Waziyah with his 11 children and a few possessions crammed into a small pick-up truck. He said he hadn’t found a single free house in the city, “not even a shelter”.
The UN’s migration agency said on Saturday that, since July, 76,000 people had fled the fighting, a figure that had quadrupled since last week.
About 1,400 people had fled to Djibouti, the country’s minister of economy and finance Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh said on Saturday.
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