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July 25, 2026

SITREP narrative·Generated 11:34 UTC·Open-source synthesis

The Red Sea now hosts a second shooting war: Saudi warplanes bombed Houthi military sites around Hodeidah, among them a naval base and a camp on Kamaran Island, after the group attacked two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and the Houthis answered within hours with a missile and drone strike that reportedly set Aramco's Jazan refinery ablaze. The new front opens as Iran rejected a US ceasefire proposal carried to Tehran by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, objecting that it left control of the Strait of Hormuz unresolved, while nightly American strikes continued and the IRGC's 27th retaliatory wave sent dozens of drones into Erbil airport, the heaviest attack yet reported on US positions there, reportedly destroying a Patriot battery. Iran's health ministry now counts 55 dead and 629 injured since June 27.

SENTINEL's logistics board is running hot, with 18 Europe to MENA airlift movements behind 13 C-17s, a nine-tanker refueling surge across the Atlantic corridor, and Lincoln and Bush still paired in the Arabian Sea, a posture that reads as sustained strike operations rather than drawdown. The thermal layer's only strong reading is a single-frame 142 megawatt signature at the Svobodnenskaya power plant in Russia's far-eastern Amur region, with no incident reported.

Ukraine sent drones roughly 2,000 kilometers to set the Tyumen refinery in Western Siberia burning, hit the Filanovsky platform in the Caspian and halted its production, and destroyed a Grave Stone radar and a Tor-M2 air defense system in Rostov-on-Don, with a missile boat and two cargo ships also claimed overnight. Russian Geran strikes de-energized military facilities via a substation at Snovsk in Chernihiv region and burned gas stations in Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions.

Markets read the day as de-escalation despite the widening map: Brent fell 3.9 percent to 96.78 and WTI 3.1 percent to 89.31 on reports that Pakistan, backed by a China anxious over Hormuz disruption, is working to restart US-Iran talks, while Tokyo's Nikkei lost 2.7 percent. Elsewhere, ICC member states voted to dismiss prosecutor Karim Khan, 82 of 125 backing removal over misconduct findings he denies, leaving the office vacant while existing arrest warrants stay in force; the storm board carries Hurricane Fausto and Tropical Storm Genevieve in the eastern Pacific and Typhoon Noul in the western Pacific.

The daily brief synthesises SENTINEL's pattern detections (strategic airlift, tanker activity, infrastructure thermal anomalies, hazards), curated wire headlines, and the day's top-scored OSINT signals. It is regenerated each morning and fact-checked in a second pass before publication.

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