Trump announced on Tuesday evening that he was pausing the
Hormuz guided transit less than 48 hours after its launch on
Monday morning. He said he is giving diplomacy
time to produce a deal. The blockade of Iranian ports
remains fully in place. Israel launched its largest
Lebanon strike since the war began on Tuesday, Operation
Eternal Darkness, killing at least 357 people across southern
Lebanon, Beirut and the Beka Valley.
Iran threatened to attack Israel directly if the aggressions
against Lebanon are not immediately stopped.
Secretary of State Rubio told a White House briefing that at
least 10 stranded sailors have already died as a direct
consequence of the Hormuz closure and the Strait is now
dealing with two additional cargo vessels.
A blaze off the UAE from Monday's confrontation.
It is Wednesday, May 6th, 2026, day 68 of Operation Epic Fury.
The hormones guided transit has been paused after less than 48
hours. Lebanon is burning under the
largest Israeli strike since the war began.
Iran is threatening to attack Israel directly for the first
time in this conflict. 10 civilian sailors are confirmed
dead from conditions in the block straight.
The proposal exchange continues through Pakistan with the US
written response under Iranian review and the deal that would
end all of it remains unwritten, unfinished and further away than
it appeared on Sunday. This is episode 68 of Epic Fury,
the US Iran war podcast. Follow on Spotify and Apple
podcast to stay with this story as it develops.
Let's get into it. Begin with the Lebanon strikes,
because Operation Eternal Darkness is the most significant
military escalation anywhere in this regional conflict since
Operation Epic Furies opening night, and because within hours
of those strikes, Iran issued its most explicit direct threat
to attack Israel of the entire war.
Israel launched what it described as a wide-ranging
military operation targeting what it said were all of
Hezbollah's command and control centers in southern Lebanon,
Beirut and the Beka Valley on Tuesday.
The operation, which the Netanyahu government named
Operation Eternal Darkness, targeting what it described as
all of Hezbollah's command and control infrastructure with the
largest single day Israeli military campaign in Lebanon
since the war with Iran began on February 28th.
Lebanese health authorities confirmed at least 357 people
were killed and more than 1200 injured across the country.
In Beirut alone, at least 92 people were killed and 742
others were injured. The scale of civilian casualties
in the Lebanese capital in a single day of strikes, 92 dead,
742 wounded in Beirut alone is without precedent in the current
68 day conflict. The three-week ceasefire
extension that was supposed to hold until mid-May has not
merely frayed, it has been shattered.
An Israeli operation name for the permanent removal of light
has ended the Lebanon ceasefire's operational reality
in everything but legal formality and has triggered
Iran's most explicit combat threat since the war began.
Iran responded with the most direct and explicit threat it is
issued toward Israel in the entire 68 day conflict.
Iranian state media reported that Iran warned it would attack
Israel directly if the aggressions against Lebanon are
not brought to an immediate and unconditional end.
That is not the language of proxy support for Hezbollah.
It is Iran placing its own military force on the table as a
deterrent against continued Israeli operations in Lebanon.
The 68 day conflict. US bombing of Iran.
Iranian missile salvos against nine countries.
A naval blockade. A ceasefire. 2 round of
Islamabad talks without agreement.
A guided transit launched and paused in 48 hours, and a
proposal exchange that remains stalled on nuclear sequencing
now is Iran explicitly threatening to reinteractive
combat operations against Israel in direct response to Tuesday's
Lebanon strikes. If that threat is executed, if
Iranian missiles strike Israeli cities or Israeli military
positions directly, the regional architecture of the ceasefire
collapses entirely and immediately.
The Lebanon operation is not peripheral to the Iran
negotiations. It is structurally central to
them in ways that Operation Eternal Darkness has now made
impossible to minimize. Iran has consistently argued
throughout the proposal exchange that cannot make concessions to
the United States while Israel is simultaneously conducting
military operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Every previous escalation of Israeli strikes in Lebanon, the
10 day ceasefire violations, the daily Israeli operations, the
village evacuations, the 2600 death toll has been cited by
Iraqi, by Galabaf and by Iranian state media as a reason the
diplomatic process cannot proceed toward a permanent
settlement while Lebanon is burning.
Operation Eternal Darkness killed more than 350 people in a
single day. 92 of them were in Beirut, Iran's closest era of
political ally. The city where Hezbollah's
leadership and infrastructure are concentrated.
The city that Iran has invested decades of military and
financial support building into a strategic position.
The scale of the Beirut casualties, 92 dead in a single
city, 742 wounded, is a political and psychological
event for Iran's government that transcends the immediate
military accounting. It is Iran watching its most
important, most expensive, and most strategically central
external partner being systematically destroyed by
airstrikes on the same day that Iran is being asked to make
nuclear concessions to the country whose allies conducting
those strikes. If Iran's civilian diplomatic
track was struggling to produce internal consensus on nuclear
concessions before Tuesday, the IRGC hardliners argument has
just become dramatically more powerful.
How does the civilian diplomatic track argue to the IRGC and the
Common A that Iran should make its most significant strategic
concession to Washington, the nuclear commitment, while
Israel, Washington's primary regional partner, is killing
hundreds of people in Beirut on the same day those concession
negotiations are supposed to be advancing?
That argument has no good available answer from inside
Iran's civilian diplomatic track.
It requires either a halt to the Lebanon strikes, which the US
has not publicly demanded of Israel, or a ceasefire framework
that explicitly links Lebanon to the Iran deal.
That explicit linkage is exactly what Iran has been demanding
throughout this process, and exactly what the United States
has been refusing since Trump said at the April 8th ceasefire
press conference that Lebanon is not included in the deal because
of Hezbollah. Turn now to Trump's decision to
pause the Hormuz guided transit because it is the most rapid
reversal of a stated U.S. military operation in the entire
conflict, and because the reasoning behind the pause is
diplomatically as significant as the operation itself.
Trump announced on Tuesday evening that he was pausing the
effort to guide stranded vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz to
allow time to finalize an Iran deal.
The blockade of Iranian ports remains in full effect.
The Guided transit, launched with 15,000 service members and
more than 100 aircraft on Monday morning and suspended with no
public announcement of duration on Tuesday evening, is on hold
pending a diplomatic outcome. The reversal took less than 48
hours from announcement to suspension, the fastest reversal
of a stated U.S. military operation since the war began on
February 28th. The implicit logic behind the
pause is this. The Guided Transit by triggering
Iranian fire on US destroyers, or at least triggering Iran's
claim of firing on US destroyers with generating an immediate
risk of a full military confrontation that would end the
ceasefire entirely, not produce a deal.
A ceasefire that collapses in a straight confrontation does not
produce a nuclear agreement. It produces a return to bombing,
a collapse of the Pakistan Channel, and a diplomatic reset
that costs weeks or months. Pausing the guided transit
removes the most immediate military trigger while
preserving the entirety of the structural economic pressure.
Iran still cannot export oil. 48 ships have been turned away by
the blockade. 31 tankers carrying 53,000,000 barrels of
Iranian crude are trapped in the Gulf with nowhere to unload.
The economic pressure is entirely unchanged by the pause.
The blockade continues in full. The three carrier groups remain
in the region. The Dark Eagle hypersonic
missiles that CENTCOM requested are still in the deployment
pipeline. But the specific escalation risk
of American warships and Iranian fast attack boats in the same 34
mile wide channel, the risk that produced Monday's competing fire
claims, has been removed. For now.
Trump is explicitly calibrating the pressure level, enough
economic pressure maintained through the blockade to
eventually produce the nuclear concession, not so much
immediate military confrontation that the ceasefire collapses
before the concession is made. That calibration, and the
judgement that the blockade alone provides sufficient
pressure, is what Tuesday's pause represents.
Whether it produces enough space for a deal before Operation
Eternal Darkness collapses the diplomatic architecture from the
Lebanon side is the question the next 48 to 72 hours will begin
to answer. And it is the most consequential
open question this conflict has yet produced.
Secretary of State Rubio appeared at a White House press
briefing before Trump's pause announcement and laid out the US
position with more specificity than any statement since the
Oval Office nuclear floor statement.
For peace to be achieved, Rubio said, Iran must agree to Trump's
demands on its nuclear program and also agreed to reopen the
Strait of Hormuz. That framing 2 simultaneous
requirements, both of which Iran has been declining to address
simultaneously. Is the US position distilled to
its minimum nuclear commitment plus Hormuz opening, not
sequenced, Not one before the other.
Both together, What was genuinely new in Rubio's
briefing was his description of the humanitarian dimension of
the hormones closure. He said thousands of civilian
sailors are stranded in the Strait aboard vessels that
entered before the war began or before the blockade tightened,
now unable to exit or proceed to their destinations.
He described those sailors as sitting ducks, isolated,
starving and vulnerable in vessels that cannot move, cannot
refuel and cannot receive the supplies that sustain a crew at
sea for an extended period. He confirmed at least 10 sailors
have already died from the conditions created by the
hormones closure, a death toll from civilian maritime exposure
that the administration had not previously disclosed publicly
and that Rubio placed on the record for the first time on
Tuesday. That Figure 10 dead civilian
Mariners, not combatants, not military service members, but
commercial seafarers from countries that have no part in
the Iran US conflict, is a humanitarian cost of the Hormuz
dispute that has been almost entirely absent from the
conflict's public narrative. It is not a statistic generated
by military action. It is the consequence of a
waterway closure sustained by two governments in a standoff
over sequencing. Those 10 sailors are the human
face of the maritime logistics emergency that India, South
Korea and the Philippines have been raising through diplomatic
channels since the conflict's opening weeks.
Rubio placing that figure on the record at a White House press
briefing. Is the administration publicly
anchoring the humanitarian argument for the guided transit?
Thousands of stranded civilian sailors, 10 already dead from
exposure and deprivation, Their home governments demanding
action as part of the legal and moral justification for Monday's
operation. Whatever military confrontation
it triggered in the Strait, the 10 dead sailors are the
administration's humanitarian answer to Iranian claims that
the guided transit was an act of aggression.
This is a rescue operation, not an invasion.
Maersk confirmed that one of the two US merchant ships that
crossed the Strait on Monday, a vehicle carrier it operates,
exited safely with US naval guidance.
That is the one verified commercial success of the Guided
Transits, 24 hours of operation. One vehicle carrier, a Maersk
operated ship, exited the Strait safely under US naval guidance.
That is the Guided Transits 1 confirmed commercial success in
24 hours of operation against it, an Iranian missile claim
against the US destroyer that CENTCOM denied, 6 Iranian fast
boats claim destroyed by the US that Iran denied, A South Korean
vessel on fire inside the Strait and two cargo vessels ablaze off
the UAE on the same day. One confirmed safe passage to
five disputed or confirmed incidents.
That ratio is the measure of what the Strait of Hormuz has
become over 68 days of war, and it is the clearest indicator of
why. Restoring commercial confidence
that requires A diplomatic resolution, not just a naval
presence, however large. The two cargo vessels ablaze off
the UAE add another layer of damage to the straits reputation
as a commercial route. British military authorities
reported the fires on Monday. The UAE denied any Iran
attributed strikes on its territory in recent days.
The origin of the two UAE fires is not confirmed and Iran denied
responsibility. But two cargo vessels ablaze
near the UAEA, South Korean vessel on fire inside the Strait
and competing missile and boat destruction claims all happening
on the same Monday, compose a picture of a waterway that
commercial shipping operators will not route vessels through
voluntarily, regardless of what US guided transit announcement
say about safety. Operation Eternal Darkness also
changes the immediate arithmetic of the Lebanon ceasefire.
The three-week extension agreed at the White House 11 days ago
with Rubio and Vance in the room, announced as a diplomatic
achievement that Trump said was made possible by his personal
involvement, has now been rendered operationally
irrelevant by the largest Israeli operation in Lebanon
since the war began. The extension expires in
mid-May. Operation Eternal Darkness has
produced casualties in a single day that dwarf what the entire
three-week extension was designed to prevent from
accumulating over 21 days. the United States is simultaneously
the guarantor of the Lebanon ceasefire extension, the country
brokering Iran, US diplomatic talks through Pakistan and the
primary supplier of the weapons with which Israel is destroying
Hezbollah's command infrastructure in Beirut.
Those 3 roles are not compatible with each other in Tuesday's
operational reality, and the question of which one Washington
prioritises ceasefire guarantor, Iran deal broker or Israel arms
supplier will shape what the next phase of this conflict
looks like. The administration that brokered
the Lebanon ceasefire extension cannot credibly tell Iran to
negotiate on nuclear terms while its ally conducts the largest
Lebanon strikes since the war began in strikes carried out
with weapons that include the $8.6 billion in emergency arms
the State Department fast tracked to Israel and Gulf
partners last Friday. It cannot credibly describe
itself as the Lebanon ceasefire guarantor while authorizing the
emergency arms sales to Israel that have supplied the munitions
being used in Operation Eternal Darkness.
France, which has been building the multinational freedom of
navigation mission for Hormuz and has been among the most
persistent European voices for Lebanon stability, called
immediately for a halt to Israeli military operations in
Lebanon. the United Nations Secretary General called for an
immediate ceasefire. Iran threatened to fight.
The European Union's foreign policy chief called the Beirut
strikes unacceptable. The international consensus
against the scale and targets of Operation Eternal Darkness is
broader and more explicit than at any previous point in the 68
day conflict. The diplomatic architecture of
the past four weeks, the ceasefire, the Islamabad talks,
the revised proposals, the Tuska crew release, the guided transit
and its paws has been built under the specific assumption
that both the US Iran track and the Lebanon track were moving,
however haltingly and with however many daily violations,
toward de escalation rather than collapse.
Operation Eternal Darkness challenges that assumption.
At its foundation, Israel's largest Lebanon strike since the
war began, Iran's most direct threat to attack Israel in the
current conflict, and Trump pausing the Hormuz guided
transit all happened on the same Tuesday.
The Lebanon operation kills hundreds and threatens Iranian
retaliation. The Hormones pause removes the
immediate military trigger while preserving economic pressure.
The Iranian threat to attack Israel creates the possibility
of a new military front that has nothing to do with the Pakistan
proposal exchange. Each of those three events,
Operation Eternal Darkness, Iran's direct attack threat, and
the hormones transit pause and isolation would be a significant
development deserving its own full analysis.
Together on the same Tuesday, they represent a compression of
risk that the diplomatic architecture Pakistan, Oman and
the US private track have been carefully building over 4 weeks
was never designed to absorb simultaneously, and the test of
the next 48 hours is whether it can absorb it anyway.
The specific danger of the Iran Israel direct threat is this
Iran threatening to attack Israel directly in response to
Operation Eternal Darkness? Is Iran making a threat that
does not go through the Pakistan channel, does not involve Arachi
or Galabaf, cannot be managed through the Islamabad framework,
and is issued by Iran's armed forces rather than its foreign
ministry? If Iran executes that threat, if
Iranian missiles strike Israeli territory in response to the
Beirut casualties, the US Iran ceasefire is almost certainly
over, the proposal exchange is over, and the war enters a new
phase in which the Lebanon track and the Iran track have merged
into a single escalating conflict.
The private track Trump confirmed last week, the one
only he and a handful of others understand, would not survive
that merger intact in 68 days of diplomatic investment through
Pakistan, through Oman, through written proposals and crew
releases and pause transits, would not survive it either.
Day 68, Operation Eternal Darkness 357 killed in a single
day. Iran threatening direct attack
on Israel for the first time in this conflict.
Trump pausing the Hormuz guided transit 48 hours after it began.
Rubio confirming 10 civilian sailors dead in the block
straight. Two more vessels ablaze off the
UE. The ceasefire between the United
States and Iran holds in name. In the formal absence of direct
US Iran military exchanges and in the continued operation of
the Pakistan Proposal Exchange. The ceasefire in Lebanon no
longer holds in any meaningful operational sense, and the
diplomatic process that was designed to end this war is now
trying to survive the conditions the war itself is generating
simultaneously, on multiple fronts and at a pace that no
single diplomatic framework, however carefully assembled over
4 weeks, was built to manage. If this podcast is helping you
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episodes directly in Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
This has been episode 68 of Epic Fury, the US Iran war podcast.
Israel's Operation Eternal Darkness 357 killed 92 in Beirut
in a single day. Iran threatening to attack
Israel directly. For the first time in this
conflict, Trump paused the Hormuz guided transit.
Less than 48 hours after launching it, Rubio confirmed 10
civilian sailors are dead in the block straight.
Two more vessels on fire off the UE. the US Iran ceasefire holds
a name. The Lebanon ceasefire does not
hold an operation. We will be back very soon.