Ceasefire in ruins: How a tanker attack unravelled the US–Iran peace framework

TEHRAN (MNTV) – Three weeks after Washington and Tehran signed a framework meant to end their war, the agreement has effectively ceased to exist.

On July 8, the interim ceasefire deal between the United States and Iran collapsed, with President Donald Trump pronouncing it finished — a declaration made from the sidelines of a NATO summit in Ankara and followed within hours by a second consecutive night of American airstrikes on Iranian territory.

By Thursday, Iran’s Health Ministry was reporting 14 dead and 78 wounded across five provinces, U.S. cruise missiles had struck rail bridges deep in the country’s north, and Tehran had fired missiles and drones at American installations in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Trigger: three ships in strait

The immediate cause was maritime.

On July 7, two tankers — the Qatari-owned LNG carrier Al Rekayat and the Saudi-flagged supertanker Wedyan — were hit by projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz. Both were damaged, and the Al Rekayat had to be evacuated after an engine-room fire left it at risk of exploding.

Qatar blamed Iran; Iranian state media hinted at responsibility without any official claim.

Less than a day later, the IRGC struck a third vessel.

Two U.S. officials told Axios that Iranian forces had launched at least two missiles at commercial shipping on Monday night, with a third vessel attacked Tuesday morning.

The attacks came days after a one-week understanding between the two countries on halting strikes in the strait had lapsed, and after a round of indirect talks in Doha ended with little movement on the Hormuz question.

Qatari foreign ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari described the strike on the Al Rekayat as an “unacceptable attack” on international navigation and energy security, saying Doha held Iran fully responsible in law.

Washington’s first response was economic.

On Tuesday it withdrew a central concession of the peace framework — the license permitting Iran to sell crude on international markets — a move that pushed oil up more than 3%.

The waiver had allowed Iran, for the first time in years, to conduct open dollar-denominated oil sales rather than discounted, sanctioned cargoes to China.

Two nights of bombardment

Military retaliation followed. CENTCOM said U.S. forces hit 90 Iranian military targets along the coastlines, and also claimed to have struck more than 60 IRGC small boats in and around the strait, along with air defenses, command-and-control networks and coastal radar sites, warning that it was postured for further action.

CENTCOM has since put the two-day total at more than 170 sites.

Iran answered in kind. The IRGC said its aerospace and naval forces carried out a joint missile and drone operation against Camp Arifjan and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait and against U.S. facilities at Juffair and Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain.

State broadcaster IRIB claimed a direct hit on the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and said ballistic missiles had been launched from Bushehr, itself struck by American forces hours earlier.

Kuwait’s army said its air defenses were engaging incoming missiles and drones. Tehran put the number of American targets struck at 85 and said it downed a U.S. MQ-9 drone.

“They’re cuckoo”

The rhetorical rupture came in Ankara.

Speaking at the NATO summit, Trump attacked Iran’s leadership over the disruption of tanker traffic — “There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo,” he said — and declared the Islamabad memorandum finished as far as he was concerned.

He accused Iranian officials of saying one thing privately and another in public, and called further negotiation a waste of time, said he was unsure whether he still wanted a peace agreement, and announced the reimposition of the U.S. naval blockade.

He also called Iran’s leaders “scum.”

Trump simultaneously threatened Iran’s civilian infrastructure.

He suggested the U.S. could hit power stations and desalination plants — “if we have to, we’ll take them out” — a category of targeting that legal experts note could constitute a war crime.

Tehran’s foreign minister responded coolly.

Abbas Araghchi wrote on X that Iranians would not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action.

Parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, accusing Washington of repeated breaches of the June accord, wrote that “the era of bullying and extortion is over.”

Infrastructure enters target set

Early Thursday, the IRGC said a U.S. missile had destroyed a railway bridge at Aqqala in the northern province of Golestan, near the Turkmen border — a rare instance of key infrastructure being hit in the current round.

Video from Iranian media, geolocated by CNN, showed the damaged span; state media put the time at around 1 a.m. local. The site lies roughly 900 miles from the Strait of Hormuz, far outside the coastal belt where American strikes had been concentrated.

A U.S. official told Axios two railway bridges in northern Iran were hit with cruise missiles. Iran’s national railway subsequently suspended passenger service on the Tehran–Mashhad line.

The timing is freighted. Khamenei, killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes of February 28, was to be buried Thursday in Mashhad after a six-day, multi-city state funeral — the same city the severed rail line serves.

What memorandum promised

The Islamabad Memorandum, brokered by Pakistan and signed remotely on June 17 by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, was a 14-point framework rather than a treaty.

It declared an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts including Lebanon, committed Iran to reopening Hormuz, obliged the U.S. to dismantle its naval blockade, and opened a 60-day window to negotiate a final deal. It also envisaged at least $300 billion in reconstruction financing, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and a phased termination of sanctions.

Enriched uranium stockpiles were to be dealt with by a mutually agreed mechanism, with on-site down-blending under IAEA supervision as the minimum standard, and the final deal endorsed by a binding UN Security Council resolution.

Crucially, the framework settled almost nothing. Nuclear enrichment, sanctions sequencing, Iran’s ballistic missile program and its regional allies were all deferred to the 60-day talks.

A memorandum of understanding is not legally binding; it establishes expectations, not obligations.

Hormuz was the fault line from the start. Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref said Tehran would retain control of the waterway and that vessels should contribute to the cost of services Iran provides for safe navigation — a position Washington and Gulf Arab governments flatly reject.

Tehran has insisted that only its designated route is safe, and is suspected of attacking ships that instead hug the Omani coast; all three vessels struck this week appeared to be on the Oman route.

Markets and mediators

Brent settled 5.2% higher at $78.02 a barrel after Trump’s remarks, having touched $80 intraday; U.S. crude closed up 4.4% at $73.52, a two-day gain exceeding 7%. The S&P 500 fell 0.3% and the Dow shed 577 points. Since the June signing, U.S. crude had settled into a $69–70 range for nearly three weeks. The escalation reverses expectations of a supply glut that had built after OPEC+ raised production quotas.

Pakistan and Qatar, the two states that pieced the process together — combining Doha’s established mediation infrastructure with Islamabad’s access to both capitals — now face the collapse of the architecture they built.

As recently as this week, indirect technical talks in Doha had produced modest steps: an agreement to buy goods for Iran using part of $6 billion in Iranian funds held in Qatar, and a mechanism for flagging violations.

Qatar said the money had not yet moved; U.S. officials maintained that no frozen funds would be released until Iran met its commitments.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, also in Ankara, urged both governments to weigh the economic cost of a return to war and to honor the ceasefire.

The summit declaration reiterated that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon and called on Tehran to respect freedom of navigation in the strait.

What comes next is unclear — including to Trump

Trump has been conspicuously inconsistent about the trajectory. Aboard Air Force One he claimed Iran had called seeking a deal, adding that he doubted Tehran was worthy of one or would honor it.

At his news conference he suggested finishing the job. Yet he also said the war would not restart, predicting instead that it would end quickly.

Analysts are less sanguine.

An Intercept review concluded the administration had achieved none of its stated war aims despite billing the June agreement as a victory, quoting one official’s assessment of a “twilight state” between war and peace that has allowed Tehran to rebuild its defenses.

The Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project argued this week that American strikes are not shifting Iranian strategy in Hormuz, and that Tehran — having failed to secure control of the waterway diplomatically — is now pressuring Gulf neighbors toward its preferred arrangements.

Iranian politics compounds the difficulty. Ghalibaf, Araghchi and Pezeshkian have all been denounced as traitors by ultra-hardliners for negotiating at all, and this week’s funeral processions featured mourners carrying placards calling for Trump’s death and demanding revenge rather than peace.

The war that began on February 28 has already produced the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market and, by mid-June, an estimated $113.3 billion in costs to U.S. taxpayers.

Two ceasefires have now been declared and violated. Whether a third is possible may depend less on the memorandum’s text than on whether either capital still believes the other will honor anything at all.