Explosions were reported near Kharg Island, the terminal responsible for most of Iran's crude oil exports, though their origin remained unclear. The semi official Fars news agency said its correspondent heard blasts but saw no visible smoke, while the SNN news agency reported that an Iranian tanker was targeted by the US near the island, a claim that has not been independently confirmed.
Kharg Island sits about 30 kilometres off Iran's mainland in the Persian Gulf, and a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite image captured by the European Space Agency on 7 March shows the scale of what is at stake there: rows of storage tanks, a runway, and port infrastructure built to move the bulk of Iran's oil onto the world market from a single site.
The uncertainty around the incident matches a week already thick with unconfirmed claims on this front. Fighting resumed around the Strait of Hormuz days earlier after a month of quiet, and Tehran and Washington have each accused the other of strikes neither has fully detailed in public. An explosion with no confirmed cause at the country's single most important export point fits that pattern rather than breaking it.
If Kharg Island's exports are actually disrupted, the effect reaches well past this one war, since the terminal is not a military target in the way a rocket launcher or a naval vessel is, it is the mechanism by which Iran's oil reaches buyers at all. An unconfirmed blast with no visible smoke is, for now, the only public description of whether that mechanism was touched.