US Strikes Iran a Third Straight Night, Trump Says Deal Still Possible While GOP Senator Presses Gulf States to Send Troops

US Central Command announced a third straight night of strikes against Iran early Tuesday, according to Breitbart, deepening a resumed military conflict that Trump formally notified Congress about last week. The notification gives the Pentagon another 60 days to operate in the region without additional congressional approval, the White House confirmed to AFP.

CENTCOM said the strikes are meant to keep "imposing a heavy cost on Iranian forces" and to "degrade their ability to attack innocent civilians and commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz." Oil prices jumped more than 9 percent on fears the conflict is widening.

The fighting isn't one-sided. The United Arab Emirates said Iran fired two cruise missiles at two UAE-flagged tankers, the Mombasa and Al Bahiyah, while they moved through Omani territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz. One crew member was killed and eight were wounded, according to the Emirati defense ministry. Iran's Revolutionary Guards also announced strikes on Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Oman, hitting US-aligned Gulf states directly.

Trump threatens a buried nuclear site and a Hormuz toll

Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the US is going "to hit them very hard tonight, and we're going to hit them hard tomorrow." He also threatened to destroy what he called Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried site near Natanz where Western intelligence suspects Iran is building an undeclared enrichment facility. "Tell the Iranians to be ready. Let them know we're coming and there's not a damn thing they can do about it," Trump said.

CENTCOM said it would reimpose a blockade on Iranian ports. Trump posted on Truth Social that the US would become "THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT" and charge a 20 percent fee on cargo shipped through the waterway, while insisting other countries would still get "fair and open use" of the strait. That claim runs into a legal problem. Charging tolls in an international strait is generally prohibited under international law, which is why Washington has also opposed Iran's own past attempts to tax passage through the same waterway.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi mocked the toll plan on X, saying Trump was "absolutely right that whoever guarantees safe passage should be compensated" but that Tehran would charge less than 20 percent, calling that figure "too much."

Despite the strikes, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he still believes an agreement with Tehran is possible. "Yeah, I think a deal is possible. Sure, I do," he said, adding that the US "had a deal with them two days ago." No details of that claimed prior agreement, or why it collapsed, have been made public.

A GOP senator says it's the Gulf states' turn

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), appearing on CNN's The Source, argued Gulf Arab states now bear responsibility for finishing the fight against Iran on the ground. "We have defanged Iran, now it's their turn to go in and finish the job that they need to finish," Marshall said. "They need to send their ground troops in, if that's what it takes. But it should not be American soldiers that are leading the way."

Marshall said Iran remains a decade or more away from a deliverable nuclear weapon, even as he acknowledged reports that Tehran is trying to rebuild its program. He also conceded a harder truth about the air campaign. Hitting dual-use infrastructure like refineries and bridges tied to munitions production will kill civilians. "Whenever you start doing that, then civilians are going to die, just like they did in the forever wars of the Gulf Coast," Marshall said, adding he no longer feels as optimistic as he did a month earlier that Iran will capitulate.

What's proven, what isn't

The strikes, the tanker attack, the UAE casualty count and the congressional notification are documented facts from CENTCOM and the Emirati defense ministry. Iran's motives for continuing to resist rather than negotiate are not established by any source here. Marshall's characterization of the Iranian regime as "irrational" is his own political assessment, not a verified finding.

Whether Gulf states will actually commit ground troops, as Marshall wants, is an open question. None of the named Gulf governments, several of which were just hit by Iranian strikes, have publicly committed to the kind of ground campaign he's calling for. Congress also has yet to hold a vote on the 60-day authorization window Trump triggered, meaning the legal runway for continued strikes without a new congressional sign-off remains untested.