US strikes Iran missiles near Hormuz with bunker busters
After Iran shut the Hormuz Strait, US-Israel war fallout grows, disrupting one-fifth global oil supply and raising tensions
The 5,000-pound bombs did not simply fall on military coordinates; they crashed into the lives of fishermen who have worked these waters for generations, into the homes of families in coastal villages who watched the horizon turn orange, and into the already fractured psyche of a region bracing for the unimaginable.
When the US Central Command announced it had deployed “bunker buster” munitions against hardened Iranian missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz, the statement was clinical, precise, and utterly devoid of the human chaos unfolding on the ground. But in the fishing villages scattered along Iran’s southern coast, there was nothing clinical about it.
Mohammad Reza Pourhossein, a 58-year-old fisherman from the port of Bandar Abbas, was preparing his nets before dawn when the first explosions rattled his windows. “The sky turned white, then red,” he later told a local journalist by phone, his voice trembling. The youngest, only three years old, kept asking if it was thunder. We didn’t know how to tell her that thunder doesn’t make the earth shake.”
These are the voices that never make it into official statements. The mothers who cannot explain to their children why the sea, which has sustained their families for centuries, is now a battleground. The old men who remember the Iran-Iraq war, who thought they had seen the last of such nights, now clutching their chests as the bombs fall again.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows, has become the world’s most dangerous choke point. But to the people who live along its shores, it is simply home. It is where young boys learn to swim before they learn to read, where women sell fish in the morning markets, where the call to prayer echoes across the water at sunset.
Now, those waters are filled with anti-ship missiles and the warships sent to destroy them. The global surge in energy prices is discussed in boardrooms and news studios, but in the villages of Hormozgan province, the surge is in anxiety, in sleeplessness, in the quiet counting of children to ensure everyone is still there.
In Washington, President Donald Trump framed the conflict as a matter of instinct. “It started based on what Trump described as a ‘feeling’ about the threat posed by Iran,” the reports noted. A feeling. A nation of 85 million people, with its poets and professors, its doctors and shopkeepers, its grandmothers and newborns—reduced to a geopolitical gut check.
Meanwhile, across the Gulf, the rejection of Trump’s call for allies to help secure the strait left a bitter taste. NATO, Europe, the usual coalition of the willing—all stepped back. It was, as the president groused, his war of choice, fought for the good of a world that apparently did not appreciate his efforts. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had urged him on, but now it was just Trump and his “feeling,” waiting for another feeling to tell him when to stop.
The bombs themselves—each costing an estimated $288,000—are engineering marvels of destruction. Designed to penetrate hardened concrete and buried bunkers, they are the kind of weapon that strategists discuss in terms of yield and penetration depth. But in the moments after impact, they are simply noise and fire and the smell of burning that carries for miles on the coastal wind.
Less powerful than the 30,000-pound bombs dropped last year on nuclear sites, these munitions nonetheless carry enough force to turn a missile battery into a crater. And somewhere near that crater, there was likely a young conscript, maybe 19 years old, who had never fired his weapon in anger, who joined the military because his family needed the salary, who was sleeping in a barracks when the deep penetrator found its mark.
His mother will not receive a statement from Central Command. She will not read about the strategic importance of the strike. She will only know that her son is not coming home.
In Dubai, where the skyscrapers glitter just across the water, the business of the world continues. But in the cramped quarters of South Asian laborers who build those towers, there is fear. They send money home to families in Pakistan and India and Bangladesh, and now they wonder if the strait through which their remittances flow—the very shipping lanes now threatened—will remain open.
The irony is not lost on the old men in Bandar Abbas who remember when the strait was just water, when sailors from Dubai would dock and share tea, when the Gulf was not a line on a war map but a shared sea, indifferent to the borders drawn on land.
Now, as the sun rises over the Strait of Hormuz, painting the water in shades of gold and crimson, the fishing boats remain at port. The children stay indoors. The grandmothers pray.
And somewhere in Washington, a president waits for a feeling.