Tehran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to all shipping and walked away from the April 8 ceasefire, as the direct exchange between Washington and Tehran ground through another day without an off-ramp. CENTCOM said its forces completed a further round of strikes on targets across Iran, with explosions reported as far north as Karaj; Iranian outlets say a strike on the Bemani area of Sirik County destroyed water infrastructure and left some 20,000 people without drinking water. The IRGC answered with two missile waves against what it called 18 US military targets, including Kuwait's Ali Al Salem and Ahmed Al Jaber air bases and Bahrain's Sheikh Isa. USS Abraham Lincoln and USS George H.W. Bush stay paired in the Arabian Sea, and SENTINEL's heaviest airlift flag again sits on the Gulf resupply route, 13 movements from Europe into MENA led by five C-17As, backed by a nine-tanker Atlantic refueling surge.
The war's inflation bill landed on Wall Street: US CPI hit 4.2 percent, a three-year high driven by energy costs, dropping the S&P 500 1.6 percent, the Nasdaq 2 percent and the Dow 1.9 percent, while the ruble firmed about 1 percent against the dollar.
On the conflict's Levantine flank, an Israeli drone strike on a car in Sidon killed two people, a rare hit on a city that had been largely spared and now shelters many of Lebanon's displaced, with further raids on Shoukin in the south; in Gaza, strikes in and around Nuseirat killed at least two Palestinians, one of them near a phone-charging point.
Ukraine set the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai ablaze with drones overnight, the latest in a string of fires at a plant struck repeatedly since last summer; the facility handles about 6.25 million tons of crude a year, roughly 2 percent of Russia's refining output, and the wider campaign had knocked nearly 40 percent of Russia's primary refining capacity offline as of May. Russian fire killed one person each in Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions and left Konotop with cuts to water, power and gas. Rounding out the board, NATO stood up its Forward Land Forces in Finland, no compound alerts fired, and six A400M-led airlift legs from Europe into Africa complete an otherwise routine logistics picture.