The 2026 Iran War is a multi-front war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran and its regional allies on the other, fought mainly across the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian, Israeli and Lebanese territory since 28 February 2026. Iranian state media has called it the Ramadan War, the Pentagon's operation is codenamed Operation Epic Fury, Israel's is Operation Roaring Lion and Iran's retaliatory campaign runs under Operation True Promise IV.¹ The war opened with roughly 900 coordinated US and Israeli strikes in twelve hours against Iranian nuclear sites, missile infrastructure and senior leadership, including the strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and within 48 hours Iranian retaliation had pulled seven more countries into the fighting.² A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took hold in April, collapsed and reformed twice, and a formal peace framework, the Islamabad Memorandum, was signed on 17 June 2026. It broke down again on 8 July 2026 when President Trump declared the truce over and ordered fresh strikes, and as of 14 July 2026 the war is active again, with Iran claiming to have shut the Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles and drones at US bases and Gulf states.³ Cross-source tallies put total deaths across all fronts at somewhere between 7,100 and 9,700, with tens of thousands more wounded, though every figure in this war has been contested and revised as fighting continues.⁴

The immediate trigger was the collapse of years of failed diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program. The 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal had unraveled long before 2026, and successive rounds of talks to replace it broke down amid mounting alarm in Washington and Jerusalem over Iran's uranium enrichment and its growing arsenal of ballistic missiles.⁵ A final round of Oman-mediated indirect talks between Washington and Tehran, hosted in Muscat and brokered by Omani foreign minister Badr Al-Busaidi, ran through February 2026, and even produced a reported breakthrough on 27 February in which Iran agreed to halt enriched uranium stockpiling and accept full IAEA verification. It made no difference. Within a day, President Trump judged the diplomatic track had failed to move fast enough and authorized the strikes that opened the war.⁵ Israeli officials had already struck first once, in June 2025, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the Twelve-Day War (Operation Rising Lion) against the Natanz enrichment site and Iranian nuclear scientists, an operation the United States joined with Operation Midnight Hammer, sending B-2 Spirit bombers to drop GBU-57A/B MOP bunker-buster bombs on the buried Fordow enrichment facility.⁶ That earlier, shorter war ended without a comprehensive settlement, leaving both Iran's nuclear program and the underlying dispute over it substantially intact even as it demonstrated to Israeli and American planners that a strike campaign against Iran's core nuclear infrastructure was operationally possible.

That earlier war left Iran's government weaker without ending the underlying dispute. By early 2026 Iran was also absorbing the fallout from the diminished position of its regional proxies after the Israel-Hamas War, and the domestic economy was buckling under sanctions, inflation and infrastructure failures, feeding a wave of protests that the government suppressed with force.⁷ US and Israeli officials argued diplomacy had run out of road and that a nuclear-armed, missile-heavy Iran presented what they called an existential threat.⁵ President Trump's public case for the strikes he ordered on 28 February listed four military goals, preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroying its missile production capacity, degrading its regional proxy network and eliminating its navy, alongside a stated preference for internal regime change in Tehran.⁸ That last objective proved the most controversial and, months later, the least achieved.

On 28 February 2026, the war began when US and Israeli forces launched close to 900 strikes in twelve hours against Iranian air defenses, missile sites, military infrastructure and leadership targets.² Israeli aircraft, roughly fifty of them, dropped more than a hundred munitions on a deep underground bunker in Tehran known as Habib Ebrahimi, killing Ali Khamenei along with his daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law and daughter-in-law, according to Iran's Fars News Agency.¹¹ The same day, a missile strike destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Hormozgan province, in what Iranian authorities put at 165 dead, most of them girls between seven and twelve years old. Independent investigations, including satellite analysis and matching of missile debris, concluded a US Tomahawk cruise missile was responsible, in what witnesses described as a double-tap strike that hit the school a second time as survivors sheltered in a prayer room.¹⁶ Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called for an investigation into the strike as a potential war crime.¹⁷

Iran responded within hours under Operation True Promise IV, and Iranian fire reached seven countries inside 48 hours, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iraq.¹⁸ Iran's government confirmed Khamenei's death on 1 March, and the Assembly of Experts appointed his son Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader on 8 March, an almost instantaneous succession that surprised analysts expecting a longer period of instability.¹¹

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq absorbed some of the heaviest early bombardment outside Iran itself. Erbil alone was hit by more than 70 missiles and drones in the war's first three days, part of a campaign Tehran justified as targeting Israeli-linked facilities and bases used by Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, and by late March the wider region had absorbed more than 450 drones and missiles, a toll that continued climbing toward roughly 855 strikes and at least 20 deaths by early summer even after the April ceasefire nominally took hold.³³ Kuwait, meanwhile, saw its main international airport struck by Iranian drones on the war's opening day, part of a bombardment campaign against the airport and the nearby Ali Al Salem Air Base that recurred repeatedly through the war and grounded Kuwaiti commercial aviation for extended stretches.³⁴

Between 1 and 4 March 2026, the war reached Europe for the first time when a loitering munition, identified by Cyprus's foreign minister as an Iranian-manufactured Shahed-type drone launched from Lebanon, struck a hangar at RAF Akrotiri on the night of 1 March, and two Iranian missiles aimed at Cyprus fell into the sea days later.¹⁰ Hezbollah opened fire from Lebanon on 2 March, reigniting the fragile 2024 ceasefire there and drawing Israeli air strikes as far as southern Beirut.¹⁹ On 4 March, Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic through a combination of sea mines, GPS jamming and IRGC boarding parties, cutting off a waterway that had carried about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade.²⁰ The same day, the US submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka, killing at least 87 sailors and leaving 32 rescued by the Sri Lankan navy.

Through late March and April 2026, the Houthi movement joined the war on 28 March, resuming missile fire at Israel, while the Institute for the Study of War documented 95 separate Iranian strike waves under Operation True Promise IV by 4 April.²² The Iranian human rights monitor HRANA reported 3,636 deaths inside Iran by 7 April, including 1,701 civilians and 1,221 military personnel.²³ A conditional, two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took effect on 8 April, though sporadic strikes continued and the war was still described as ongoing by mid-April.²⁴ By 9 April, the UAE said it had intercepted 537 ballistic missiles, 2,256 drones and 26 cruise missiles fired from Iran using THAAD and Patriot batteries, with 13 Emiratis killed and 224 injured, the heaviest toll of any Gulf state.⁹ From 13 April to 29 May, the United States enforced a naval blockade of Iranian ports, turning away 94 vessels by 22 May, and on 21 April Trump extended the ceasefire indefinitely.²⁵

Across May and June 2026, the ceasefire's hold on the Strait of Hormuz proved fragile. On 1 May, Kuwait said it captured four Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel who landed on Bubiyan Island, a strategically sensitive Gulf island hosting a major new port, after a firefight that wounded one Kuwaiti soldier, an incursion Iran's foreign ministry blamed on a navigation failure rather than an infiltration attempt.³⁵ On 3 June, an Iranian drone struck Kuwait International Airport shortly after US strikes on Iran's Qeshm Island, killing one person and wounding 63, damaging Terminal 1 and forcing a temporary airspace shutdown, an attack Iran's IRGC denied while Kuwaiti security footage reportedly showed a Shahed-type drone hitting the terminal.³⁶ On 4 May, the United States launched Operation Project Freedom to escort commercial shipping through Hormuz, sinking seven Iranian fast boats and taking fire that hit a French container ship, before pausing the operation on 6 May as negotiators reported progress toward a deal.²⁶ Pakistan's own navy separately launched Operation Muhafiz-ul-Bahr on 9 March to escort Pakistani-flagged vessels through the crisis, a defensive measure distinct from the American operation.²⁷ On 12 June, Washington and Tehran agreed new ceasefire terms, and on 14 June Trump announced a deal to end the war and reopen Hormuz along with lifting the naval blockade.²⁸ The agreement was formalized on 17 June as the Islamabad Memorandum, a fourteen-point framework signed remotely by Trump, from the Palace of Versailles after a G7 summit, and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, in Tehran. Its terms included an end to strikes, toll-free reopening of Hormuz for 60 days, termination of the naval blockade, a 60-day negotiating window on sanctions relief and Iran's nuclear program, and a proposed $300 billion reconstruction plan alongside the possible release of up to $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.¹⁵

In July 2026, the truce collapsed on 8 July, when President Trump said the ceasefire agreement was effectively over after Iran fired on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and the US launched fresh strikes on Iranian military targets in response.³ Iran retaliated by firing on US bases across the Gulf, and by 11-12 July Tehran claimed renewed strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar and Oman and declared the Strait of Hormuz closed again, a closure US officials disputed even as tanker traffic dropped.²⁹ Kuwait reported damage to border posts and an offshore oil platform, Qatar reported injuries including a child from drone interceptions, and Jordan reported missile impacts causing minor damage.²⁹ As of 14 July 2026, the war remains in an active, unresolved state, with neither a durable ceasefire nor a final settlement in place.

Is the US at war with Iran in 2026? Yes. The United States has been a direct combatant against Iran since 28 February 2026, and after a ceasefire collapsed on 8 July 2026 both countries resumed strikes on each other's forces and territory.³

Did Israel strike Iran in 2026? Yes. Israel launched Operation Roaring Lion alongside the American Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026, including the strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Israeli forces have remained engaged against Iran and its allies throughout the war.²

What is the 2026 Iran war? It is a war that began on 28 February 2026 between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran and allied groups including Hezbollah and the Houthis on the other, fought over Iran's nuclear and missile programs and triggered by a surprise US-Israeli strike campaign.¹

Who killed Ali Khamenei? Israeli aircraft killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a strike on his underground bunker in Tehran on 28 February 2026, using intelligence supplied in part by the US Central Intelligence Agency, according to Iranian and Western reporting.¹¹

Why did the Strait of Hormuz close in 2026? Iran restricted and later closed the strait to commercial shipping starting 4 March 2026 using sea mines, GPS jamming and naval boarding parties in retaliation for the US-Israeli campaign, reopened it under the June Islamabad Memorandum, then claimed to have closed it again in July after the ceasefire collapsed.²⁰

Is the 2026 Iran war still happening? Yes, as of 14 July 2026. A ceasefire signed as the Islamabad Memorandum on 17 June 2026 broke down on 8 July, and both sides have resumed strikes since, with no new ceasefire in place.³

How many people have died in the 2026 Iran war? Estimates vary widely by source and keep changing. Cross-source tallies as of 12 July 2026 put total deaths across all fronts at roughly 7,100 to 9,700, with close to 47,000 wounded, while Iranian and Lebanese casualties make up most of the toll.⁴

Did the US use bunker-buster bombs on Iran? Yes. B-2 Spirit bombers dropped GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-buster bombs on Iran's underground nuclear sites, including Fordow, Natanz and the Parchin complex, both in the 2025 Twelve-Day War and again during the 2026 Iran war, drawing down a US stockpile analysts say will take years to rebuild.⁶