Iran launched one-way attack drones at commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz on both 12 and 13 June, a second consecutive night. CENTCOM (US Central Command), the US military command for the region, said its forces downed all of them and that "traffic flow through the strait continues unimpeded".1 The naval blockade ran on alongside the drone combat: 139 vessels redirected, 9 disabled.2
Iran spent the war as the blockade's target, its oil traffic strangled by US enforcement. This weekend it fired drones at the very commercial ships using the strait, while Washington shot those drones down to keep the lane open. The same waterway Iran tried to deny the world it is now trying to make dangerous instead, a shift from interdiction to harassment, the posture of a party that cannot hold the water but can still raise the insurance premium on it.
This is distinct from the 11 June CENTCOM strike on the MT Settebello that killed three Indian sailors and put US firepower on a tanker, and from the IRGC Navy's Telegram order barring all Hormuz traffic that CENTCOM rejected as ineffective. No new CENTCOM strikes hit Iranian soil in the window, so the land stand-down held across the weekend. All drones downed, no US casualties, contained but brittle: a single hit on a crewed commercial vessel would end the contained status overnight.
