Two Ships for Three Tankers: The Naval War Turns Direct as Tehran's Press Fights Over Who Owns the Cost

The war became a direct U.S.-Iran naval exchange on September 5. CENTCOM says Revolutionary Guard ballistic missiles were fired at a U.S. aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer, and that both ships evaded. The United States then struck three Iranian crude carriers, one off Kharg Island, one near Jask, and one unladen vessel in the Gulf of Oman. Admiral Brad Cooper set the exchange rate in public: two U.S. ships fired on, three Iranian vessels put out of service. Tehran answered with a claimed missile salvo from Sirik at tankers using lanes it had not authorized, a Revolutionary Guard statement claiming hits on the carrier, and a separate claim of an attack on a U.S. unmanned surface vessel. None of the Iranian claims had independent confirmation by the cut-off, and the report grades them at moderate confidence. The sequence is contested, but the direction is not. Washington now fuses force protection with revenue destruction, and Tehran now enforces its lane rules with fire. At home, the Iranian press reads the same night in two opposite ways, and that split is the day’s most useful signal. The hardline titles present the tanker strikes as an act of American frustration. The reformist Nobonyad and the traditional-conservative Resalat count the leverage Iran gave away in the Islamabad memorandum. The free-market dollar opened at about 227,200 tomans, up roughly 20 percent in a month, and First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref conceded that the enemy is now targeting the economy and social capital. Former president Hassan Rouhani is under attack from every camp, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf’s insistence that negotiation is not surrender is the lone principlist defense of diplomacy. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has conceded that its pre-2023 deterrence is hard to restore and has named Iran as the political way out. The report’s bottom line is that neither side gained a decisive advantage in the last 24 hours, and that the Iranian press is printing the regime’s confidence and its anxiety on the same page. This post summarizes our daily intelligence report for September 6.

Two Ships for Three Tankers

CENTCOM’s September 5 release is unusually explicit about its logic. Admiral Cooper said that if Iran shoots at two U.S. ships, the United States will impose a higher economic cost by taking out three Iranian vessels. CENTCOM described the tankers as part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the Revolutionary Guard and its regional partners. In other words, naval retaliation has become a component of economic warfare, and the target is Iran’s revenue base rather than only its launch chain. The three vessels named were the Downy off Kharg, the Stark 1 near Jask, and the unladen Kylo, also known as the Noxen, in the Gulf of Oman. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as carried by the Iranian outlet Fararu, added that Iran’s tanker fleet is defenseless and would be sunk if Iran fired on U.S. ships. The Kharg anchorage strike that yesterday’s edition reported from Iranian media alone now has an official U.S. account, and a rationale.

Iran’s answer was equally explicit. The Revolutionary Guard Navy commander warned late on September 5 that every suspicious movement would be targeted and promised a response to the attack on the three tankers. Less than an hour later, IRNA reported that Iran had fired three missiles from Sirik toward Hormuz, striking three tankers on unauthorized routes and three U.S.-linked vessels elsewhere. Early on September 6 the Revolutionary Guard Aerospace Force issued Statement No. 10, claiming that several ballistic missiles had targeted the carrier and the destroyer and caused damage. The report treats this as a probable description of the same episode CENTCOM placed before the tanker strikes, and does not count it as a second attack. Statement No. 11 from the Guard Navy then claimed an attack on a U.S. remotely controlled surface vessel attempting to enter a protected area of the strait. No U.S. confirmation of either claim had appeared by the cut-off. Tehran is asserting the authority to decide which transits are permitted and to fire on the rest. Even where U.S. escorts can force a passage, that rule can suppress normal traffic by raising the expected cost of every voyage.

The independent evidence sits between the two accounts. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations office issued Advisory 127 in the afternoon of September 5, reporting that several merchant vessels in the northern Gulf and the Gulf of Oman had been subjected to disabling fire. Casualties and environmental impact were unconfirmed. The report’s assessment is that this moves the commercial risk from threats, mines, and detention to disabling fire on merchant hulls in an active U.S.-Iran exchange. Iran’s claimed strike on ships using unauthorized routes adds a second layer, because owners and insurers must now price the possibility that their chosen lane or escort arrangement will itself be treated as hostile. Reuters, citing Kpler, counted only four commodity-vessel transits on Thursday against a ten-day average of about 15 and roughly 125 a day before the war. The chokepoint stays commercially impaired without being physically closed. Araghchi’s calls to the Saudi and Turkish foreign ministers in the early hours of September 6 show that Tehran is trying to keep retaliation against U.S. assets separate from a rupture with Gulf governments. No confirmed large-scale attack on a Gulf state was identified overnight.

One Night, Two Readings

The hardline titles treat the tanker strikes as an admission of American failure. Vatan-e Emrooz leads its right column on an attack on the blockade and explains the strikes on Iranian tankers as revenge for missile hits on the U.S. fleet, which is the Revolutionary Guard’s own line. Hamshahri, the Tehran municipality paper, reports the failure of the American escort. It claims that U.S. military escorts could not open the route for a Qatari ship, which turned back before entering the strait. The claim is unverified and Qatar has not commented. Kayhan’s box on the blockade sits under a headline declaring Trump defeated. Kayhan International’s English-language lead builds on the CBS report that the Pentagon polygraphed about 50 Joint Staff personnel over leaks about dwindling missile stocks, and pairs it with a vow of more severe strikes on what it calls U.S. naval terrorism.

The critical titles read the same night as lost leverage. Nobonyad, the reformist daily, leads on a longing for 100-dollar oil over a photograph of a laden tanker. Its deck is the sharpest sentence on any front page today. While America enforces naval blockade, military attack, and economic sanctions one after another, it argues, Iran surrendered its most important tool of pressure on Trump in the memorandum. Below it, Nobonyad prints Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani’s own criticism of the memorandum and a business-chamber report that the Leader followed up twice with Qalibaf on China. Resalat’s lead asks whether Iran was the target of a premeditated ambush before anyone speaks of war with a great power, over a map of a burning Hormuz and a falling market. Khorasan asks whether the tanker war has returned. Sazandegi asks whether the Hormuz disruption has handed an opportunity to Iran’s neighbors, and Iran Daily reports that Oman’s exports to Iran are surging under trade restrictions.

The report’s assessment is that the regime’s own papers agree on the facts and disagree on the meaning. The split runs along the memorandum. The hardline camp says Washington is breaking the deal because it is losing, and the reformist camp says Iran gave away its leverage and Washington is collecting. Both camps accept, without saying so, that Hormuz is now the war’s main instrument and that the tanker fleet is Iran’s exposed flank. Until this week the strait was covered as a permit regime and a bargaining chip. Today five titles cover it as a front, with burning ships on their maps. The press has caught up with the Guard Navy’s own shift from rule-setting to firing, and Hegseth’s line about a defenseless fleet will be tomorrow’s argument inside Tehran. The rule-setting contest behind this is the one we described in Two Claims, One Strait.

The Economy as a Named Front

The government has now described the domestic front as a war front in its own words. Aref said the enemy, after failing in the military arena, is targeting Iran’s economy and social capital. He acknowledged inflation and high prices, promised a resistance-economy plan and household-livelihood measures under wartime conditions, and said sanctions and the blockade are meant to force Iran to its knees. Javan carries the confident half of the speech on its front page, with Aref promising to defeat the enemy on the economic front too, and Asr-e Iranian carries the defensive half, with Aref saying the government is not worried about the naval blockade. Admiral Sayyari, the regular Army’s coordinating deputy, described the conflict as a war of wills and endurance. The armed forces and the public are being prepared for a long contest.

The currency gave the papers their numbers. The free-market dollar opened at 227,205 tomans on Khabar Online’s morning reading, up 6,145 on the previous 24 hours, and Fararu puts the monthly rise at about 20 percent. The Central Bank said it has new instruments to meet precautionary dollar demand. Charsoo, the economic daily, leads on borrowing governments, with a bar chart of average monthly growth in government borrowing from the Central Bank that places Pezeshkian at 4.95 percent against 2.48 for Rouhani and 1.96 for Raisi. The same page carries an interview with MP Peyman Falsafi arguing that Iran lacks a suitable economic formation against America, that people are worried about the blockade, and that the government’s currency policy is itself a cause of price rises. Charsoo also reports the gold coin at 234 million tomans against 42 million at the start of the Pezeshkian government. Smaller items fill in the picture of administrative strain. Jomhouri-ye Eslami reports two provinces cutting gasoline consumption by non-price means, Farhikhtegan reports that half of all gasoline is now consumed without a fuel card, Khorasan ties probable energy shortfalls to virtual teaching and overcrowded schools, and Shargh leads on transit trade with neighbors that is disrupted and in places priced out. These are the ordinary costs of the war, printed without the vocabulary of resistance. The economic dailies’ fuller reading of the same morning is in today’s Economic Press Review.

The report’s judgment is that the regime is managing the cost of the war by naming it and by attaching it to the executive rather than to the war decision. That protects the Leader’s office and the Revolutionary Guard and exposes the president. Two conservative titles address Pezeshkian directly. Khorasan, a Mashhad paper that is not hostile to him, asks what his solution is and observes that he states problems without offering answers. Asr-e Iranian prints a letter from Basij students at Imam Sadegh University telling him to return to unity. The president is now taking fire from the right on competence rather than ideology, which is harder to answer, and his room to move is narrowing from both sides while the dollar moves against him.

Who Owns the Failure

The factional fight is visible on at least nine front pages and has a single organizing target in Hassan Rouhani. Farhikhtegan, the Azad University paper, runs a full-page portrait under a headline that brands him the Sheikh of Loss and asks why his head reappears when society needs cohesion. Kayhan’s satirical dialogue column pairs him with former president Mohammad Khatami as men who advertise surrender under the code name of an honorable peace, and Kayhan’s front page reminds readers of the Westernizers’ 7 percent popularity. Javan’s full-page cartoon seats three reformist economists on the arms of a Trump scarecrow, each with a quotation bubble, and reads them as scarecrows raised to frighten the public into surrender. Charsoo, an economic paper without a clear camp, uses its borrowing chart to hit Rouhani and Pezeshkian together. Asr-e Iranian’s editorial asks what the bloggers in politics, from Zia to Rouhani, are after.

The reformist and centrist side is defensive. Nobonyad prints Rouhani, but under a hostile headline about his attacks on state broadcasting, and pairs him with Zakani’s hard line on the memorandum. Khorasan adds a box telling Rouhani to update himself, since the road he proposes does not exist. Sobh-e No, the paper aligned with Qalibaf’s circle, runs a coded warning against building a front within the front, sourced to three named commentators, against forming a new political assembly at this moment. Sazandegi’s business columnist Hossein Salahvarzi tells the government that a listening ear is no longer enough. The report’s assessment is that the signs of distress are real and are now printed by the regime’s own papers, but that the signs of an organized domestic challenge are not present. What the pages show is a preemptive strike by the hardline camp to fix responsibility for the war’s cost on the reformists and on Rouhani personally, before the cost becomes the question. It also signals that the leadership expects a debate about a settlement and is closing the space for anyone to lead it.

Qalibaf is the one senior principlist defending the diplomatic track in public. In an explanatory statement to the Iranian public, repackaged overnight in a two-minute Persian-language video, he argued that Iran should fear neither war nor negotiation, because both are methods for protecting national interests. He said that “negotiation is not equivalent to surrender,” described it as part of the resistance strategy alongside military action, and placed the final choice of war, diplomacy, or both under the authority of the Supreme Leader. On Hormuz, he tied Iran’s national security to preserving what he called Iranian arrangements in the strait and linked its bargaining position to its field power. The report’s reading is that Qalibaf is not arguing for a settlement. He is arguing for the right to negotiate without being called a traitor, and he does it by wrapping diplomacy inside the resistance vocabulary. Kayhan’s Yaddasht-e Rooz by Seyyed Mohammad-Emad Aarabi shows why he needs to. It builds a 125-year chain from the 1901 D’Arcy oil concession through Bahrain, the F-14s, and Bushehr to the present, and concludes that any Iranian who calls Hormuz a burden or weighs enrichment by cost and benefit is an agent of the same foreign employer. If the campaign against Rouhani and the reformists succeeds, Qalibaf becomes the only remaining address for a negotiated exit, and today’s pages show that address is already under fire from the right. The same factional pages are read from the press-monitor angle in today’s Iranian Press Monitor.

American Dissent as Iranian Proof

Trump mockery and the Sanders echo are the day’s dominant front-page device, and they run across the political spectrum. Sobh-e No devotes its lead to Senator Bernie Sanders, photographed at a podium, under the line that Trump’s war has ruined America’s economy. Kayhan International prints the same Sanders post and quotes his fuel figures. Tehran Times leads on the claim that everyone is against the war except its architects, built on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s reply to Trump’s remark that the war is small potatoes, and adds Representative Ted Lieu rejecting the failed-state line. Vatan-e Emrooz prints Trump in the flames of diesel, and Seda-ye Iran, the Leader’s media channel, leads on America’s desperation reaching the financial and debt markets over a photograph of the New York Stock Exchange floor. Asr-e Iranian runs a full graphic from an unnamed U.S. institute in which 58 percent of respondents call the war a mistake and 48 percent expect the United States to lose. Javan and Kayhan International both use the CBS polygraph story.

The report reads the device as a narrative technique with a specific function. It lets the Iranian reader see American cost without seeing Iranian cost, and it lets the hardline press claim that dissent in Washington is evidence of victory while dissent in Tehran is evidence of treason. Kayhan’s lead ties the two layers together by declaring Trump defeated and his domestic errand boys flailing. The technique is coordinated across state-aligned, Guard-aligned, and municipal titles on the same day, which points to a shared editorial line. Its analytic value is low, but its indicator value is real. The leadership believes the war will be decided by American political tolerance and is telling the public to wait for it. The line has a weakness that Nobonyad and Resalat exploit, because the same American sources also report that the blockade is holding and the tanker fleet is exposed. One item deserves its own log entry. Kayhan’s satirical column asks why Americans do not rid themselves of Trump with a few bullets. That is a new register for a paper that speaks for the Leader’s office, and the report flags it as an open incitement line that no other title prints.

Ali al-Taher and Hezbollah’s Admission

Hezbollah’s line hardened on September 5. The party issued a formal statement blaming the continuation of Israeli attacks on full U.S. partnership and accusing the Lebanese authorities of persisting in a futile and unconstitutional direct negotiating track. MP Hassan Ezzeddine went further than the party statement. He said the political authority had lost credibility by betting on Washington, and then addressed the party’s own position. Restoring the deterrence that existed before 2023 is difficult, he said, although the resistance is still fighting to prevent further Israeli expansion. His answer to the question of a way out was Iran. He portrayed the Islamabad understandings as having reduced the targeting of Hezbollah leaders and argued that Lebanon is a first-order item for Tehran in any wider arrangement. Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani answered with patron reassurance, describing Hezbollah as a tall tree with deep roots. The report’s reading is that the useful signal is the reassurance itself, offered at the moment the party is conceding a deterrence problem.

On the ridge, Al-Ahed’s analysis does not deny battlefield pressure. It argues that operational fire control should not be equated with physical possession, and it asserts that the Lebanese Army, rather than Hezbollah, declined a handover of the position because it could not defend it. No Lebanese state source in the material reviewed supports that assertion, and the report grades it at low confidence. Its purpose is clear enough. If the Army cannot safely replace Hezbollah on exposed terrain, then territorial pressure proves the continued need for the party’s weapons, which is the opposite of the disarmament case. Iranian online media also carried an Israeli claim of encircling Iranian personnel in a tunnel on the hill, which is unconfirmed and appears on no front page. Current reporting establishes that the heights are under intense military pressure and have become a central public issue in Lebanon and now in Iran. What remains disputed is the degree of physical control, the status of underground infrastructure, and responsibility for any failed handover.

The Iranian press adopted Hezbollah’s vocabulary within a day. Kayhan’s top-left headline reports the hill as neither fallen nor occupied, Vatan-e Emrooz calls the Israeli account a psychological operation, and Farhikhtegan sends two correspondents to file a first-hand account from the Lebanese hill and from the site of the Sirik wedding strike in a single feature. Jomhouri-ye Eslami’s editorial, the only Tehran editorial on the file, argues that the Lebanese government’s negotiating track serves Israel’s timetable. None of the papers carries Ezzeddine’s admission on deterrence. The Iranian reader gets the resilience half of the message and not the concession, and the report treats that gap between what Hezbollah says in Beirut and what Tehran prints as an indicator of how much the concession worries the patron.

Lawfare, the Treasury, and the Axis Fronts

The BRICS judicial heads meeting in Tehran is the second-largest story on the front pages. Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei opened it with a call for an order in which no power sees itself above the law, and Iran Daily leads on his appeal to BRICS to pursue legal action against Iran’s aggressors. Kayhan and Sobh-e No both print his warning that judicial systems must not be indifferent to the crimes of America and Israel. The same pages contain the counter-evidence. Iran Daily reports, below its lead, that the Bishkek declaration omitted naming the United States and Israel as aggressors, and it also reports Peru’s decision to sever diplomatic relations with Tehran. Vatan-e Emrooz’s lead endorses the regional security architecture Xi Jinping described in Cairo, the same Chinese-backed concept Qalibaf endorsed on September 4. Jomhouri-ye Eslami reports G20 members calling for a rapid end to the war. The report describes a diplomatic campaign in three registers, lawfare through BRICS courts, a China-anchored regional order, and appeals to G20 fatigue, and notes that none of the registers has produced a partner willing to name Washington.

Washington’s answer is financial. The Treasury’s September 4 designation of Istanbul’s Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi and two subsidiaries targets the conversion of Iranian oil revenue from China into cash and gold for the Quds Force. The tanker strikes and the bank designation attack the same chain from opposite ends, the hulls that carry the oil and the accounts that turn it into money. The sanctions architecture is the one we summarized in Operation Economic Outcast. On the energy side, Brent settled Friday at 96.28 dollars after Reuters corrected an earlier lower figure, and WTI at 91.48, the strongest week since mid-July. U.S. retail diesel averaged a record 5.85 dollars a gallon. OilPrice estimates Hormuz oil flow at roughly 6 to 8 million barrels a day against nearly 20 million before the war. Saudi Arabia is leaning on the East-West pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE on Fujairah, ADNOC continues LNG loadings at Das Island with vessels running dark, and Asian spot LNG is at its highest since 2022. Diesel is the channel that matters politically, because it feeds trucking, agriculture, and construction, and it is the number Sanders, Vatan-e Emrooz, and Kayhan International all print today. Tehran’s theory of converting maritime disruption into American domestic cost has its clearest evidence in that price.

On the axis fronts, Yemen’s ground war is active and its maritime front is paused. The government-aligned SABA agency reported advances on the Hayfan front south of Taiz, strikes on a Houthi camp in al-Jawf, and several drone interceptions, and it blamed a Houthi ballistic missile for four civilians killed on the Hayjat al-Abd road. Houthi SABA answered with tribal mobilization in al-Bayda. No new maritime claim from spokesman Yahya Saree was identified, and the report reads the absence as a pause rather than de-escalation, since the movement retains the capability and the incentive to reopen the Red Sea front if the U.S.-Iran exchange widens. Sobh-e No is the only Tehran front page to carry Yemen, and it prints the Houthi version. In Iraq, Nujaba’s Mahdi al-Kaabi rejected handing resistance weapons to the government, called a state monopoly on arms an American demand, and made U.S. withdrawal a condition for any national dialogue. No fresh verified attack on a U.S. base by the Iraqi factions was identified in the window, and the report judges it too early to call the quiet durable. The Qatari side of the Hormuz argument is covered in yesterday’s Qatar Watch.

Net Assessment

The last 24 hours did not produce a decisive break for either side. U.S. pressure is destroying revenue-linked hulls and squeezing the conversion of oil into money. Iran keeps Hormuz commercially abnormal, has moved from rule-setting to firing, and is pairing retaliation with Gulf diplomacy. Hezbollah concedes a deterrence problem and answers with a harder domestic line and an appeal to Tehran. Yemen is fighting on land. The Iranian press prints the regime’s confidence and its anxiety on the same morning, and directs the anxiety at the president and at Rouhani. The contest is broadening rather than converging. The report names three things to watch this week: whether the United States moves from tankers to Kharg loading infrastructure, whether the dollar breaks 230,000 tomans, and whether Ali al-Taher produces a Lebanese state statement on the handover dispute.

Key Points

CENTCOM’s account of Guard ballistic missiles fired at a U.S. carrier and destroyer, followed by strikes on three Iranian crude carriers, is the first public U.S. framing of naval retaliation as economic punishment. Washington now fuses force protection with revenue destruction (high confidence, on an official CENTCOM release).
Iran’s claimed missile fire from Sirik at tankers on unauthorized lanes, and its claimed attack on a U.S. unmanned surface vessel, mean that rule-setting has become a firing policy. Damage is unconfirmed (moderate confidence, since the claims rest on IRNA and Guard statements with no independent confirmation).
UKMTO’s report of disabling fire on several merchant vessels moves commercial hulls into direct exposure in a U.S.-Iran exchange. Military access has not restored commercial throughput (high confidence).
The free-market dollar at about 227,200 tomans, up roughly 20 percent in a month, is the clearest transmission channel from blockade to household expectations, and Aref’s admission that the enemy is targeting the economy is a rare senior acknowledgment of domestic vulnerability (high confidence).
The Iranian press splits along the memorandum. Hardline titles read the tanker strikes as U.S. frustration, while Nobonyad and Resalat read them as lost leverage and a possible ambush. The argument is over who owns the cost of the war (high confidence).
Rouhani is the agreed target of the hardline camp, attacked by at least six titles and printed critically by his own side. The campaign is preemptive, fixing blame for the war’s cost on the pro-engagement camp before the cost becomes the question (high confidence).
Qalibaf’s insistence that negotiation is not surrender is the lone principlist defense of the diplomatic track. He wraps diplomacy inside the resistance vocabulary and places the final choice with the Leader, and his own political space is under pressure from the right (high confidence).
At least six titles use Sanders, Schumer, Lieu, U.S. polls, or the Pentagon polygraph story to argue American defeat. This is a coordinated narrative device rather than spontaneous coverage, and Kayhan’s incitement line against Trump is a new register (high confidence).
Hezbollah has conceded that restoring pre-2023 deterrence is difficult and named Iran as the way out, while refusing disarmament. Al-Ahed’s claim that the Lebanese Army declined the Ali al-Taher handover is a Hezbollah-affiliated assertion, not a Lebanese state fact (high confidence on the admission, low on the handover claim).
Yemen’s ground war is active and its maritime front is paused, and Iraq’s factions are escalating politically while showing operational restraint (moderate confidence, on partisan SABA accounts and a single Nujaba interview).

What to Watch

A confirmed Iranian hit with major damage or casualties on a U.S. carrier or destroyer, or U.S. expansion from tanker destruction to Kharg loading infrastructure.
The free-market dollar crossing 230,000 tomans, a Central Bank move from statements to visible intervention, or a second consecutive day of front-page borrowing or inflation numbers.
A Lebanese state statement on the Ali al-Taher handover dispute, or Israeli confirmation of the tunnel claim carried by Iranian online media.
Iranian press treatment of Hegseth’s defenseless-fleet line, and whether the hardline titles engage it or ignore it.
A Yahya Saree maritime strike claim reactivating the Red Sea front while the Taiz ground fighting continues.
Any named BRICS partner endorsing the Tehran judicial track in writing, against the Bishkek precedent of omission.
Further Kayhan escalation in the satirical column’s register against Trump personally, or a walk-back.
A direct hardline attack on Qalibaf by name for the negotiation-is-not-surrender line, or a Leader’s-office signal endorsing it. Either would settle who owns the diplomatic track.
A further step-change downward in Kpler-observed Hormuz transits, or the first insurer withdrawal from Gulf of Oman cover.

This post summarizes the Iran Dossier daily intelligence report on the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, Hormuz, and the Axis of Resistance, combined with the Iranian Press Monitor, for September 6, 2026 (source cut-off 08:45 on September 6, reporting window the previous 24 hours). Eighteen Iranian titles were surveyed for 15 Shahrivar 1405, with Kayhan International included at the desk’s request. Sourcing is actor-first: the U.S. account from the CENTCOM release, with Hegseth via Fararu; Iranian claims from IRNA and the Revolutionary Guard’s Statements No. 10 and 11; independent maritime warnings from UKMTO Advisory 127; Hormuz traffic from Reuters citing Kpler; Iranian domestic material from IRNA, Khabar Online, TGJU, Fararu, and Qalibaf’s official Telegram channel and Tasnim; Hezbollah material from Al-Ahed, Al-Manar, and Al-Mayadeen; Yemeni material from the two SABA agencies and Al-Masirah; Iraqi material from Ultra Iraq; the Golden Global designation from the Treasury Department; and energy prices from Reuters, OilPrice, and Bloomberg via Rigzone. The report’s evidentiary flags are preserved here: Iran’s tanker-strike and unmanned-vessel claims had no independent damage confirmation at the cut-off; the Guard’s Statement No. 10 may describe the same episode CENTCOM placed before the tanker strikes; Hamshahri’s Qatari-ship claim is unverified; Al-Ahed’s Lebanese Army handover claim is a Hezbollah-affiliated assertion; the U.S. poll in Asr-e Iranian is from an unnamed institute; the Yemen accounts from the two sides cannot be reconciled; and the two-minute Qalibaf video is treated as corroborating messaging rather than a separately dated official statement. Party claims are identified as claims, and translations of headlines are the report’s own.