The deadline arrived, and then it moved again.
For the third time since March 21st, Trump extended the power
plant ultimatum this time to Tuesday at 8:00 in the evening
Eastern Time. Iran rejected it within hours,
calling it incitement to war crimes.
An Iranian missile hit a residential building in Haifa,
killing at least two people and wounding four others, with
rescue workers still searching for those missing.
Elite Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 operators were among the
hundreds of personnel who rescue the F15 E Weapon systems officer
from deep inside Iran, the first time since 1994 that AUS pilot
was shot down in combat and the most complex special forces
rescue operation in recent American military history.
And Trump told the Wall Street Journal and Axios that if Iran
does not make a deal, he will blow up everything over there.
It is Monday, April 6th, 2026, day 38 of Operation Epic Fury.
The deadline that was supposed to define this war came and went
without a strike, without a ceasefire, and without a deal,
and became a new deadline. Tomorrow night at 8:00, this war
reaches its fourth power plant ultimatum in less than 3 weeks,
and it's most consequential test of whether Trump's coercive
diplomacy has any teeth left. This is episode 38 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. Start with the deadline, because
understanding exactly what happened on April 6th and what
happens next requires understanding the full sequence
of events that produced it and what its passing without
consequence means for the next 24 hours.
Trump first threatened to strike Iranian power plants on March
21st, giving Iran 48 hours to fully reopen the Strait of
Hormuz or face destruction of its energy infrastructure,
beginning with the biggest plant first 12 hours before that
deadline expired. On March 23rd, he announced A5
day extension, citing productive conversations that Iran denied
had taken place. On March 26th, with a 5 day
extension about to expire, he announced A10 day extension to
April 6th at 8:00 in the evening Eastern Time, citing what he
said was Iran's request for more time and the gift of ships
allowed through the Strait. April 6th arrived.
Hormuz remained closed. No power plants were struck.
Instead, Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday 8 in the evening
Eastern Time. That is now the fourth version
of the same deadline. The pattern is now definitively
established. Trump issues a deadline.
The deadline arrives. The deadline moves.
Whether Tuesday will be different, whether the 4th
version of this ultimatum will be executed or extended 1/5
time, is the central question that the world will be watching
for the next 36 hours. What has changed is the specific
phrasing, Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
If they don't make a deal, I'm blowing up everything over
there, he told Axios. If they don't come through, if
they want to keep it closed, they want to lose every power
plant and every other plant they have in the whole country.
Those are not the phrasings of a president contemplating a fourth
extension. They are the phrasings of a
president preparing the public for execution of the threat.
There is also a political cost to a fourth extension that did
not apply to the third. Each extension has incrementally
undermined the credibility of the threat itself.
Markets and analysts have begun to price in the possibility that
the power plant threat is permanently rhetorical, a tool
of coercive pressure rather than a genuine military intention.
Each additional extension reduces its value as leverage.
The first extension was understandable.
The second was a surprise, but defensible.
The third, on April 6th, arrived despite the bridge strike and
the much more to follow framing and still did not result in
execution. A fourth extension, absent some
concrete and verifiable movement from Iran on Hormuz or the
nuclear question, risks rendering the power plant threat
permanently incredible. That is a significant strategic
cost, and it is one that the Trump administration's own
negotiators understand. Iran rejected the Tuesday
deadline as it has rejected every previous deadline.
Iranian officials dismissed the latest ultimatum, condemning it
as incitement to war crimes. Iran warned of retaliatory
attacks if the United States strikes power plants, desalina
tion facilities or bridges. The IRGC has maintained
throughout this conflict that any attack on civilian energy
infrastructure will be met with equivalent attacks on the Gulf
States own civilian energy and water infrastructure.
Given that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait,
Qatar and Bahrain depend on desalina tion for their drinking
water, the stakes of that threat are not abstract.
A sustained campaign against desalina tion plants across the
Gulf would create a humanitarian crisis for populations that have
no alternative water supply. There's also a specific legal
dimension that Iran and its international supporters are
pressing. International humanitarian law,
specifically the 4th Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court, prohibits attacks on
civilian infrastructure indispensable to civilian
survival. Power plants that provide
electricity to hospitals, water treatment facilities, and
residential populations meet that definition.
Multiple senior UN officials. Amnesty International and the
International Committee of the Red Cross have all publicly
stated that the threat to strike Iranian power plants constitutes
A threatened war crime. the United States government has not
engaged with that legal assessment.
The Trump administration's position is that the strikes are
legitimate military pressure to reopen the strategic waterway.
The gap between those two legal frameworks, 1 based on military
necessity and strategic coercion, the other based on the
protection of civilian populations, has not been
resolved and will not be resolved by the Tuesday deadline
passing in either direction. The Haifa missile strike is the
development from Monday that carries the most immediate human
weight. An Iranian ballistic missile hit
a seven story residential building in Haifa, Israel's
third largest city and a major port, killing at least two
people and wounding four others. Israeli emergency workers were
still searching for missing residents trapped under the
rubble as a Monday afternoon. Haifa has been targeted
throughout this conflict, but this is one of the most
significant strikes on a residential building in an
Israeli city since the war began.
The missile appears to have struck several apartments.
Two people are dead, 4 are wounded and in the rubble of a
Haifa apartment building on the 38th day of this war.
The gap between the strategic language of deadlines and the
human reality of what this conflict is doing to ordinary
people is once again impossible to ignore.
The Haifa strike also carries significance for the Israeli
domestic debate. Israeli far right lawmakers have
been pushing for Israel to draw a new security border in Lebanon
and expel hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who live
South of the proposed line. Israeli Defense Minister Israel
Katz said that if Lebanon does not take action beyond mere
statements against Hezbollah, Israel will invade Lebanon and
do it themselves. The Israeli military chief of
staff warned government ministers last week that the IDF
is under severe strain stretched across multiple war fronts
including Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the security of the West
Bank, and that the government is sending the army into a multi
front war without a strategy, without the necessary means, and
with too few soldiers. That warning from the ID FS own
Chief of Staff is the most significant internal Israeli
military assessment of the wars cost to emerge publicly.
It suggests that the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem
in this conflict is not symmetrical in terms of burden.
the United States is conducting the overwhelming majority of
strikes on Iran from a position of enormous strategic overmatch.
Israel is simultaneously managing Lebanon, Gaza, West
Bank security and the Iranian missile threat against its
cities, a multi front burden that its own senior military
leadership is describing as approaching the limits of what
the IDF can sustain. Lebanon's death toll from
Israeli operations has now surpassed 14160.
According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, more than 1,000,000
Lebanese nationals, roughly 1/6 of the country's entire
population, have been displaced since the war began.
The terms of what a deal would actually require of both sides
deserve examination because the gap between the American 15
point framework and the Iranian 5 point counter proposal is not
merely procedural, it is substantive in ways that make
any quick resolution structurally difficult, even if
both sides are willing to negotiate.
The American framework, as reported by multiple news
organizations, requires Iran to halt all uranium enrichment, not
merely reduce it, but stop entirely.
It requires Iran to roll back its ballistic missile program.
It requires Iran to cease financial and material support
for proxy groups, including Hezbollah, the Houthis and
Palestinian armed factions. It requires the full reopening
of the Strait of Hormuz to all international shipping.
And it requires comprehensive verification by the
International Atomic Energy Agency, including access to
sites that Iran has previously closed to inspectors.
Iran's five point counter proposal, as reported by Al
Jazeera and others, requires the United States to pay reparations
for the war, a condition that no American administration could
accept domestically, politically, or legally, given
that the United States does not recognize the legal basis for
any such claim. It asserts continued Iranian
sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, including the right to
restrict passage, a position that directly contradicts the
International Maritime law principle of innocent passage
that the entire world trading system depends on.
And it contains conditions on nuclear oversight that
effectively preserve Iran's right to enrich, which is the
single condition that the United States designated as non
negotiable from the start. Those gaps are not bridgeable in
a single negotiating session. They may not be bridgeable at
all without a sustained diplomatic process that neither
side has yet formally agreed to begin.
The Pakistan intermediary channel is passing messages.
It is not yet hosting negotiations.
The rescue missions full picture came into sharper focus on
Monday with CNN reporting that elite units including Delta
Force and Seal Team Six were among the hundreds of special
operations troops and intelligence personnel involved
in retrieving the F15 E Weapon Systems officer.
The officers aircraft and F15 E Strike Eagle from the 48th
Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England,
was shot down during a night mission in southwest Iran on
Friday. Delta Force is the US Army's
tier one special missions unit used for the most sensitive
hostage rescue and direct action operations in the American
military inventory. SEAL Team 6 is the Naval Special
Warfare Development Group, similarly Tier 1 and responsible
for the Bin Laden raid and other high profile operations.
The deployment of both units to rescue a single down crew member
is a measure of how seriously the US military took the risk of
IRGC capture and how much political and strategic weight
Trump attached to the outcome. Trump told Netanyahu in a call
on Monday, as confirmed by Netanyahu's post on social
media, that he expressed his appreciation for Israel's help
in the rescue. Netanyahu said he was deeply
proud that the cooperation between the United States and
Israel on and off the battlefield is unprecedented.
He congratulated Trump for the perfectly executed American
mission. That framing cooperation on and
off the battlefield is a public acknowledgement that the
alliance between Washington and Jerusalem in this conflict is
not merely a military one. It encompasses intelligence
sharing, operational deconfliction and the kind of
real time coordination that allowed Israel to stand down to
full days of air strikes specifically to protect the US
rescue operation inside Iran. The F15 E that was rescued was
from the 48th Fighter Wing based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk,
England, a detail that also draws Britain, however
indirectly, into the operational picture of this conflict in ways
that the Starmer government's careful positioning has tried to
avoid. 4 Iranian Red Crescent aid workers have been killed
since the war began, according to the International Federation
of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
The IFRC issued a statement noting that the Red Crescent
emblem is an internationally recognized symbol of neutral,
impartial, and independent humanitarian assistance, and
that ensuring the protection of humanitarians wearing the emblem
is not only a moral issue but an imperative international legal
norm. The killing of four Red Crescent
workers across 38 days is 1 indicator among many of the
pattern of damage to civilian infrastructure in this conflict.
The World Health Organization identified 13 Iranian health
infrastructure sites struck in the war's early weeks. 5
hospitals have been hit. Shujare Tia Bay Girls Elementary
School in Minnow was struck in the first days of the war,
killing 180. The sports hall in Lambert was
bombed during a girl's practice session, killing at least 18
civilians. Multiple universities have been
struck. Every one of those incidents,
taken individually, represents a tragedy that would have
dominated international news in a different context.
In the context of this war, they are entries in accumulating log
that the daily military briefings do not address.
The war has now been running for 5 1/2 weeks.
More than 2000 people have been killed in Iran, more than 1400
in Lebanon. More than 30 people have been
killed in Arab Gulf states since February 28th.
The majority of the migrant workers, a demographic that
lacks political voice and media coverage but absorbs A
disproportionate share of the physical risk of Iranian attacks
on Gulf infrastructure. 13 US service members are dead.
The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed.
Oil is above $100 per barrel. Gas in the United States is at
$4.06 per gallon. British energy bills are rising
from LNG supply disruption. Australian petrol prices are at
post pandemic highs. Free public transport has been
introduced in Victoria and Tasmania to offset the cost.
The Bank of America forecasts oil at $100 per barrel through
the end of 2026. The UN Food and Agriculture
Organizations chief economist warned this week that markets
will absorb the war's impact if the conflict ends in the next
two weeks, but that if it continues for three to six
months, it will not only impact food security and energy but
other sectors as well because prices will rise.
He added that the fall in remittances from overseas
workers, many of whom live in the Gulf states now under
sustained Iranian attack, will affect economic development and
growth across the developing world.
The war's economic toll is not a short term shock.
It is a structural feature of 2026 and on a three to six month
horizon, its effects on food security in the global S could
dwarf its direct military consequences.
And yet the diplomatic track, however thin, remains nominally
open. Pakistan is still serving as the
intermediary. Turkey and Egypt are still
working behind the scenes. The 15 point US proposal is
still on the table. Iran has not formally agreed,
but it has not formally and finally rejected it either.
Arachi has continued to engage with regional counterparts even
as he publicly dismisses the 15 point framework is unreasonable.
Posseschian has made conditional statements about Iran's
willingness to end the conflict even as the IRGC publicly defies
every deadline. And the leaked Posseschian
Vahidi exchange makes clear that the civilian government has been
cut out of the negotiating process.
The structural picture is this. There are two documents on the
table, a 15 point American framework and A5 point Iranian
counter proposal. The gap between them is large.
The American framework requires Iran to halt all nuclear
enrichment, rollback its missile program, and see support for
proxy groups. The Iranian counterproposal
requires war reparations, continued Iranian sovereignty
over the Strait of Hormuz, and conditions on nuclear oversight
that no American administration could accept.
But the existence of both documents and the continued
activity of the Pakistan Intermediary channel means the
diplomatic infrastructure for a deal exists, even if the deal
does not. Yet every ceasefire in modern
history has been built on exactly this foundation. 2
positions that appear irreconcilable and then a crisis
moment that forces both sides to choose between a bad deal and a
worse war. Whether Tuesday at 8:00 in the
evening is that moment is the question on which this episode
ends. If the power plants are struck,
Iran retaliates against Gulf desalina tion infrastructure,
oil spikes to 120 or $130.00 per barrel, and the humanitarian
consequences for 90 million Iranians become catastrophic,
the pressure on all parties to find a resolution will intensify
dramatically. If the deadline passes again
without a strike, the credibility of every future
American ultimatum in this conflict, and potentially beyond
it, will be further eroded. Neither outcome is good.
One is more immediately catastrophic.
That is the choice that Tuesday at 8:00 in the evening, forces
for each of the three Democratic allies whose populations are
most directly experiencing the economic consequences of this
war, the 38th day produces a specific picture.
In the United States, the rescue of the F15 E weapons systems
officer has temporarily shifted the domestic narrative from
economic pain to military pride. But the fundamental situation
Gas above $4.00, oil above $100 for the foreseeable future. 13
service members dead. A war now in its sixth week with
no announced end has not changed.
Trump's approval rating remains at its lowest point of his
second term. Republicans in competitive
midterm districts are managing the war as both asset and
liability simultaneously. The rescue provides an emotional
counterpoint to the economic argument against the war.
It does not resolve that argument.
In the United Kingdom, the April 6th deadline has passed into a
Tuesday deadline with no formal response from the British
government. Starmer continues to walk his
narrow path, reaffirming support for the war's stated objectives
while declining military participation in offensive
operations. British energy bills are rising.
Parliament has not voted on the war.
The Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford Co belligerents
question remains officially unresolved.
Labor backbenchers are increasingly vocal.
The 35 Nation Maritime Coalition that Starmer assembled is a post
war framework that does nothing for today's energy prices in
Australia. Prime Minister Albanese's
pushback against Trump's criticism has received wide
domestic coverage. The specific accusation that
Australia was not great and the specific rebuttal that every
request made has been agreed to defines Australia's position
precisely. It is an ally that is doing what
is asked of. It has not been asked to do what
cannot politically justify and is absorbing economic costs
without military exposure. That position is sustainable for
now. Whether Trump, emboldened by the
rescue and under domestic pressure to execute his
deadline, asks more of his allies in the weeks ahead is the
question. Tomorrow is Tuesday, the
deadline is 8 in the evening Eastern Time.
Trump has said he will blow up everything if no deal is
reached. Iran has said it will retaliate
against the Gulf state civilian infrastructure if any power
plant is struck. The diplomatic track is
nominally alive. The military campaign continues
at its established pace and a new deadline, the 4th, is now
the hinge on which this conflicts next chapter turns.
If this podcast is helping you make sense of what is happening,
please take 30 seconds to leave a review on Spotify or Apple
Podcasts. It makes an enormous difference
to how many people find the show.
This has been episode 38 of Epic Fury, the US Iran war podcast.
Tomorrow is Tuesday, the 4th deadline arrives at 8 in the
evening Eastern Time. The April 6th deadline passed
without a strike. Whether the Tuesday deadline
will too, or whether this is the moment the coercive threat
finally becomes kinetic, is the question this war will answer in
the next 24 hours. We will be back very soon.