Iran War Latest: Where the US-Israel-Iran Conflict Stands

Seven months after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the war has no ceasefire and no settlement, and on 8 October President Donald Trump said he would not order new strikes before the US midterm elections on 3 November. The pledge buys about four weeks. It leaves the American blockade in place and settles nothing about the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s enriched uranium or the fighting that has spread to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

This analysis sets out where each front stands on 9 October 2026: the stalled talks, the American election that now sets the war’s timetable, Iraq after the US withdrawal, the new war in Yemen, and Sudan, where the same Gulf rivalries are at work.

Where does the Iran war stand now?

The war is in its third phase. The first was the air campaign that opened on 28 February, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on its first day and ran until a ceasefire on 8 April. The second was the diplomacy that produced the Islamabad Memorandum, signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on 17 June. The third began on 8 July, when Iranian forces struck commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz to assert control of the waterway and the truce collapsed. Washington reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports a week later.

Since then the fighting has been mostly at sea. The UK Maritime Trade Operations centre counted nine attacks on merchant ships in the first week of October alone. US forces have cleared mines from the shipping lanes and bombed Iranian positions on Larak Island on 30 August, and the Revolutionary Guard answered by firing on American bases in Jordan. What has not returned is the large-scale bombing of the spring. Our August assessment described strikes paused under threat, and that description still holds.

The cost is visible on both sides. Iran’s government has put its dead at more than 3,500. A Congressional Research Service report updated this week says at least 81 US military aircraft and drones have been lost or damaged, 45 of them MQ-9 Reapers.

What has Trump said about Iran this week?

Trump has spoken about Iran almost every day this month, mostly from campaign stages, and the statements do not point in one direction.

The 8 October post was the clearest of the six. Trump wrote that “we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections”, said the blockade would remain in full force and claimed that 22 million barrels of oil had moved through the Strait of Hormuz in a single night.

It followed a week of reporting that he was preparing the opposite. Axios reported that the Pentagon had told Central Command to finish preparations for resuming major combat operations, with Iranian energy sites, infrastructure and nuclear facilities as the likely targets. The New York Times described one option as three days of intense strikes. US officials briefed the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, on a possible resumption within about three weeks, and Zamir reportedly warned that Iranian missile fire on Israel could delay Israel’s own election on 27 October.

Tehran has reason to discount the pledge. In June 2025 the White House said Trump would decide within two weeks whether to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, and he attacked within days. On 27 February this year he said he had made no decision on war, less than a day before it began. Iranian officials, Axios reports, are determined not to be surprised a third time. The pledge also covers only American attacks on Iran. It says nothing about Israel, Yemen or what happens on 4 November.

How is the war shaping the US midterm elections?

The election explains the pause. All 435 House seats and about a third of the Senate are on the ballot on 3 November, and the war’s effect on prices is a large part of why the president’s party is trailing. Gasoline averages $4.37 a gallon, according to AAA figures cited on 5 October, and diesel has passed $6. Trump campaigned in 2024 on gasoline below $2.

Markets showed the logic within minutes. Brent crude had climbed above $105 a barrel on 8 October on the reports of imminent strikes. It fell back to about $103 after the post. A new air campaign in the next three weeks would push fuel prices up just as ballots are cast, and about a third of US states have already cut or suspended fuel taxes.

A Democratic House would not end the war, but it would change its terms. Democrats would control the committees that examine war funding and munitions requests, and could force votes on the president’s war powers. That prospect gives Trump an incentive to settle the matter, by deal or by force, in the window between the vote and the new Congress in January.

Israel votes first. Its election on 27 October is too close to call: a Channel 13 poll on 8 October gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc 55 of 120 seats to the opposition’s 50, other surveys put the opposition ahead, and neither side reaches the 61 needed to govern.

Why are the US-Iran talks stuck?

The two sides are arguing over who moves first. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi set out a seven-day plan in New York in late September and passed it to Washington through Qatar. As The National reported it, the strait could reopen on the sixth day if agreed steps are carried out, and nuclear negotiations would follow. Iran’s conditions are a definitive end to attacks on it and on its allies, the lifting of the blockade and the release of frozen funds. It has also offered to dilute its stock of 60%-enriched uranium and send it abroad, and says Russia has offered to take custody of the material.

Washington wants the strait opened first. On enrichment its line has softened: Vice President JD Vance told Reuters on 6 October that Iran must do something “meaningful” about its enrichment capacity, which is short of the zero-enrichment demand Trump made earlier in the war. Araghchi says Iran is studying the American reply and will answer within days. He also said on 4 October that there was no military solution to the conflict, while President Pezeshkian called the negotiations meaningless and told a summit in Turkmenistan that talks could succeed only without pressure and threats. Vladimir Putin, who met him there, offered Russian mediation.

Meanwhile the strait itself is neither open nor closed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Iran has lost control of it. The Revolutionary Guard says it remains shut to anyone who ignores Iranian rules, and parliament is advancing a bill to charge transit fees. The data firm Kpler puts Gulf crude exports, excluding Iran’s, at about 18.5 million barrels a day, roughly the pre-war level, with 40% of the oil bypassing Hormuz. Tankers are still being hit, and Iran has twice claimed to have seized American underwater drones there.

That recovery matters more than any statement. Iran’s leverage in the spring was that closing Hormuz took about a fifth of the world’s oil off the market. If exporters can now move most of it anyway, the closure costs Iran more than it costs its enemies, because the American blockade still stops Iranian oil. It also lowers the price Trump pays for waiting. Both governments can tell themselves that time is on their side, which is why neither has moved.

What is happening in Iraq?

Iraq was a battlefield in the spring and is now a test of whether the state can control its own armed groups. It faces that test without American troops. The last US soldiers left Erbil on 30 September, ending the 12-year mission against Islamic State on a timetable agreed before the war. The Pentagon says it will keep providing training and intelligence support.

During the 39 days of the first phase, the Iraqi government counted 138 US strikes on its territory and 92 dead, most of them fighters of the Popular Mobilization Forces. Militias fired on American bases, on the Kurdistan Region and, from July, on Saudi oil infrastructure. US and Saudi aircraft bombed militia sites on 29 July. A drone attack that shut Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline on 12 September was blamed by Saudi officials on Iraqi factions, though other accounts attribute it to the Houthis.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, a 41-year-old banker, took office in May after Trump threatened to cut aid if Nouri al-Maliki returned to the post. He has promised to bring weapons under state control. The deadline was first tied to the American departure. It has slipped to June 2027, only a few small groups have agreed to disarm, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq says it is bound by no timetable. Kataib Hezbollah has told its fighters to halt operations except against hostile aircraft, which is a ceasefire it can end whenever it chooses.

Two things are worth watching. The Kurdistan Region has lost the American air defences that protected it through more than 1,000 drone and missile attacks, by the Peshmerga ministry’s count. And Baghdad is hedging: Iraqi Airways this week became the first foreign airline to fly to Iran since the war began. If strikes on Iran resume, the militias will no longer have American bases in Iraq to hit. Their likely targets are the Gulf states, Jordan and Israel, and the response would fall on Iraq anyway.

Why has Yemen become the war’s second front?

Because much of the oil that no longer goes through Hormuz now goes past Yemen. Saudi Arabia has raised exports from its Red Sea port of Yanbu from about 1 million to as much as 4.9 million barrels a day, which makes the Bab el-Mandeb Strait the second chokepoint of the war. The Houthis understood this early. They declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia in July, when the 2022 truce in Yemen broke down, and in September they took about 150 km of Red Sea coast along with the port of Mokha and the islands of Perim and Hanish.

The reply came this month. Yemen’s internationally recognised government announced a campaign on 4 October to retake all Houthi-held territory, and says it has recovered Dhubab and Mokha, which the Houthis deny. The Saudi-led coalition reported 97 strikes in a single day around Taiz, where about 150 people were reported killed in fighting on 2 and 4 October. The Houthis have cut the main road from Taiz to Aden and fired ballistic missiles at Riyadh’s international airport. Saudi authorities say three people were killed there on 6 and 7 October.

The UN migration agency counts more than 200,000 people displaced. Weekly ship transits through Bab el-Mandeb fell to about 25 after Houthi attacks resumed in July, against about 80 before the Red Sea crisis began in 2023, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

Washington has so far stayed out. Trump’s senior team met at Camp David on 2 October to discuss both Iran and the Saudi-Houthi war, and he is reported to have turned down five proposals for strikes on Iran or the Houthis in recent months. Saudi Arabia has a second option in the defence pact it signed with Pakistan and Turkey in August, which it has not invoked. Iran, for its part, has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition for reopening Hormuz and may add Yemen to the list. The fronts are being tied together at the negotiating table as well as on the map.

Where does Sudan fit in?

Sudan is not a front in the Iran war. It is where the war’s side effects are most severe, because the Gulf states now absorbing Iranian and Houthi fire are also the main outside backers of Sudan’s rival armies.

On the ground the army has the initiative. It took al-Mazroub in North Kordofan on 2 October, cutting a road into the Rapid Support Forces’ territory in the west, and is pushing towards En Nahud. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said this week that there would be no negotiations and that the army would retake every inch of the country. That is a rejection of the 90-day humanitarian truce proposed by the United States, whose envoy Massad Boulos met Burhan in Egypt days earlier.

The Iran war reaches Sudan in three ways. Washington designated Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in March and cited its links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which put Burhan’s Islamist allies on the wrong side of the wider conflict. The army has nonetheless gone back to buying Iranian weapons, according to the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, after a Saudi-financed arms deal with Pakistan worth $1.5 billion was held up in the spring. Pakistani vehicles and drones have since reached the army. And Port Sudan, the country’s main port, depends on the Red Sea shipping the Houthis now threaten. Food prices in Sudan have risen about 40% since February.

More than 14 million Sudanese are displaced and close to 20 million face acute hunger. The mediators who might stop the war, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, are divided among themselves, and Riyadh has reportedly threatened to leave the group. A war that needs the Gulf’s full attention is getting what is left of it.

What happens after 3 November?

Three outcomes are plausible, and the military preparations are consistent with all of them.

A sequenced deal. Iran reopens the strait in stages while the United States eases the blockade and releases funds, with the uranium shipped out under international inspection and the nuclear file left for later. This is the seven-day plan with the order of steps renegotiated. It needs Trump to accept something less than zero enrichment, which Vance’s language suggests is possible.

A short, heavy air campaign. The carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island are due in the region by the end of October with about 9,000 sailors and Marines. They join the carriers George H.W. Bush and George Washington and bring the American total to roughly 20,000. Two more Patriot batteries have gone to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That is the force for the reported three-day option, and it arrives just as the election passes. The limit is the one set out in our guide to American missile stocks: the first 39 days used up a large share of the interceptors that would be needed to absorb Iran’s reply.

Drift. The blockade continues, oil finds its way round, and the war moves to Yemen and the Red Sea, where neither Washington nor Tehran fully controls its partner. This is the present course, and it is the one most likely to produce an escalation nobody planned.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Iran war over?

No. The April ceasefire and the June memorandum both broke down on 8 July. The war has continued since then as a US naval blockade of Iran, Iranian attacks on shipping and limited American strikes, without a return to large-scale bombing.

Will the US attack Iran before the midterm elections?

Trump said on 8 October that it will not attack before 3 November. US media report that strike plans are ready for the period after the vote.

Is the Strait of Hormuz open?

Partly. Tankers are moving and Gulf exports are close to pre-war levels, helped by routes that bypass the strait. Ships are still being attacked, and Iran says the waterway is closed to vessels that ignore its rules.

Are there still US troops in Iraq?

No. The last American troops left Erbil on 30 September 2026. The United States says it will continue training and intelligence support.

Who controls the Bab el-Mandeb Strait?

The Houthis have held the Yemeni side, including Perim Island, since their September offensive. Yemeni government forces backed by Saudi Arabia began a counter-offensive in early October.

When did the 2026 Iran war start?

On 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched air strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.