The Iran War at Seven Months: A Timeline From Operation Epic Fury to Stalemate

How a 40-day “decisive victory” became an open-ended war of attrition over the Strait of Hormuz

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran — codenamed Operation Epic Fury by Washington and Operation Roaring Lion
by Israel.

Seven months on, there has been no peace deal, no durable ceasefire and no resolution to the war’s central flashpoint: control of the Strait of Hormuz. What follows is a dated chronology of how the conflict has moved through five distinct phases : opening decapitation strike, regional widening, a ceasefire that never quite held, a formal memorandum that collapsed within weeks, and the tanker war now playing out as diplomats meet in New York.

Phase One: The Opening Strike (28 February – early March 2026)

28 February 2026, 2:30 a.m. ET — US Central Command and the Israeli Air Force opened Operation Epic Fury with a coordinated strike inside Iran, per CNBC’s live coverage and NPR. President Trump announced the launch of “major combat operations” in an eight-minute Truth Social video, after only a War Powers notification and a Gang of Eight briefing rather than a congressional vote.

The opening salvo struck Ali Khamenei’s residential compound along with other senior-leadership sites : an operation US and Israeli officials openly described as a leadership-decapitation strike.

Targets included IRGC command-and-control facilities, air defence systems, missile and drone sites, and naval assets; strikes also hit a girls’ school in Minab, which Wikipedia’s attack-by-attack tracking
(sourced to contemporaneous wire reporting) puts at 148–168 killed, this and other single-incident casualty figures below have not been independently re-verified by this author and should be checked against primary wire copy before publication.

28 February, Saturday afternoon — Hours after the video — and after Israeli officials said Khamenei’s body had been recovered from the ruins of his compound, per NPR. Trump confirmed the death in a separate Truth Social post: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” as reported by
The Hill and NBC News.

Iranian state media confirmed the death shortly after; Tehran declared 40 days of national mourning. Iran’s government reportedly put its initial overall death toll from the opening strikes at 3,117, per coverage citing wire reporting; Khamenei’s office later claimed a toll as high as 32,000, a figure well above independent estimates, unconfirmed by any neutral body, and included here only as an official claim rather than an established fact.

28 February – 2 March — Iran retaliated within hours, firing ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and at US bases and allied states across the Gulf — Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia all reported strikes or interceptions, and the IRGC announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to US- and Israeli-linked shipping.

Hezbollah entered the war on 1–2 March, striking an Israeli base in Haifa; Israel responded with airstrikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon and, within days, a ground incursion; opening a parallel Lebanon front that reportedly displaced roughly 700,000 people, per UNHCR figures cited in later reporting. (This Lebanon-front figure is distinct from, and should not be confused with, the separate Lebanese civilian death toll cited in Phase Five.)

1–8 March —Under Iran’s constitutional succession provisions, a three-member Interim Leadership Council. President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and cleric Alireza Arafi; assumed the Supreme Leader’s powers pending a permanent successor, per
Wikipedia’s sourced account of the Interim Leadership Council; security chief Ali Larijani was separately described by some outlets as the de facto lead figure on military matters — a characterisation, not a title, and one this draft could not confirm against a named outlet beyond the aggregator source.

On 8 March, the Assembly of Experts elected Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the new Supreme Leader, with clerical council members telling Amwaj Media that roughly 85–90 percent of attending members backed him. Larijani was assassinated in a separate Israeli strike in mid-to-late March, per Al Jazeera— after, not before, Mojtaba’s election. HRANA, which tracked strikes throughout the war, recorded triple-digit daily strike counts across a dozen or more provinces through this period.

Phase Two: Regional Widening and the Hormuz Crisis (March 2026)

Fighting spread well beyond Iran and Israel during March. Iranian and Western reporting put the number of Iranian navy vessels destroyed in the war’s opening days at more than 20, including several sunk at their moorings in Bandar Abbas and Konarak.

Two sinkings drew particular attention: the frigate IRIS Dena, which Al Jazeera and legal analysis in Just Security both report was torpedoed on 4 March by the US submarine USS Charlotte roughly 20 nautical miles off Sri Lanka, described as the first submarine combat sinking since the Second World War, with Sri Lankan officials cited as saying 87 bodies were recovered and 32 survivors rescued of the roughly 180 believed aboard and the submarine IRIS Fateh, which CENTCOM announced it had sunk on 3 March.

These naval figures rest on Al Jazeera, Just Security and Wikipedia’s sourced tracking rather than a Pentagon or Iranian casualty list and should be weighed accordingly.

Separately, satellite imagery reportedly showed damage to the Natanz nuclear facility, and a US raid reportedly destroyed Iranian oil infrastructure on Kharg Island; both await a dedicated primary-source check beyond the aggregator trackers used here. Unverified reports also describe damage to Golestan Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Tehran, and drone or missile fire reaching Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Jordan and Iraq — none of which this draft could trace to a named primary source, and which should be cut or re-sourced before publication.

The closure of the Strait — through which roughly a fifth of global oil consumption normally passes — triggered a shipping crisis. By 9 March, insurance rates for vessels transiting the strait had reportedly risen four to six times over the previous week, and the International Maritime Organization convened an extraordinary session over an estimated 20,000 seafarers stranded on roughly 3,200 vessels queued west of the strait — figures that should be checked directly against IMO statements rather than relied on at second hand. The US dispatched a third carrier strike group, led by USS George H. W. Bush, to the region.

Iran begged for this ceasefire — and we all know it.

— Pete Hegseth, 8 April 2026

Note on the quote above: it is confirmed verbatim by Defense One and other outlets covering the 8 April Pentagon briefing. Several of those same outlets — including Fox News — refer to Hegseth there as “Secretary of War” or “War Secretary” rather than “Secretary of Defense.” This reflects the department’s contemporaneous rebranding under the Trump administration rather than an error in this draft, but the article should state that explicitly for readers unfamiliar with the name change, and ideally cite the underlying executive order or department notice renaming the post.

Phase Three: Ceasefire and Its Collapse (April 2026)

7–8 April 2026 — The US and Iran agreed an initial, two-week ceasefire, brokered through Pakistani channels, after — as Hegseth put it — “40 days and 40 nights of war,” per the Guardian/AOL report of his briefing.

Iran committed to reopening the Strait of Hormuz; Washington declared Epic Fury’s objectives achieved. Hours after the announcement, Israel launched what it called its most powerful attacks yet on Lebanon; Wikipedia’s sourced casualty tracking for that strike cites at least 357 killed, a single-day total that should be checked against the Lebanese health ministry or wire reporting directly before publication. The strike undercut Pakistani and Iranian claims that Lebanon was covered by the truce, which diplomats later told CBS News Trump and Israel had initially agreed to.

11–12 April — A 21-hour, three-round negotiating session in Islamabad failed to produce a comprehensive follow-on agreement, per Wikipedia’s account of the Islamabad Talks.

13 April — The United States imposed a naval blockade on vessels doing business with Iranian ports, creating — alongside Iran’s intermittent closures of Hormuz — what regional reporting described as two competing blockades of the same waterway.

17–19 April — Iran announced it had “reopened” the strait, then shut it again a day later; the IRGC opened fire on an Indian-flagged vessel, and Iranian forces struck US THAAD-linked radar assets earlier deployed to Gulf states.

21 April — President Trump extended the ceasefire indefinitely despite the unresolved Hormuz standoff. Low-intensity exchanges — drone strikes, tanker seizures, and skirmishes involving Iraqi militias — continued through the following weeks regardless.

Phase Four: Diplomacy and the Islamabad Memorandum (May–June 2026)

A note on terms before this section: “ceasefire,” “termination of hostilities” and “memorandum of understanding” are distinct legal and diplomatic categories, not interchangeable labels, and the dates below should not be read as a single continuous truce — each is a separate instrument with its own scope and its own collapse.

1 May — A War Powers letter from the administration reportedly declared hostilities “terminated” — a formal designation that sat awkwardly alongside continuing strikes and naval incidents in the Gulf. This draft was not able to locate the underlying letter or an official transcript; it should be sourced directly to the White House or Congress before publication rather than relied on second-hand.

3 June — A drone attack, attributed to Iran, reportedly hit Kuwait International Airport — needs a named wire or Kuwaiti-government source before publication.

12 June — The US and Iran reportedly agreed new ceasefire conditions after renewed talks.

17 June — Presidents Trump and Pezeshkian reportedly signed the Islamabad Memorandum, said to be a formal memorandum of understanding setting a 60-day window to negotiate final terms and lifting the dual blockade on the strait. No primary text of the memorandum was located for this draft; its exact terms should be confirmed against an official US, Iranian or Pakistani statement, not inferred from secondary coverage.

28 June — The two sides reportedly agreed separately to cease their exchange of attacks, reaffirming the memorandum’s terms after a period of renewed tension.

Phase Five: Collapse Into the Tanker War (July–September 2026)

6–7 July — Iran attacked three commercial vessels that had bypassed its preapproved transit route through Hormuz — an assertion of Iranian sovereignty over the strait that, per Britannica, caught US officials by surprise and effectively broke the memorandum’s terms.

7–8 July — President Trump said he considered the truce over; strikes resumed and the Islamabad Memorandum became largely defunct within days.

Through the summer, fighting settled into a lower-intensity but persistent pattern: a US-led naval blockade of Iranian ports on one side, and Iranian harassment and seizure of tankers transiting Hormuz on the other, punctuated by periodic strikes on Iranian assets at Qeshm Island and Bandar Abbas.

By early June, the MilitarySpend.org tracker — an aggregator, not a primary source — had put confirmed US military deaths at 19, citing a disputed press report suggesting the true figure was 22–23; it also cited disputed Iranian military casualty estimates running into the thousands and a reported 4,386 Lebanese civilian deaths on the separate Lebanon front, sourced there to the Lebanese Ministry of Health via TASS and Al Jazeera. Every figure in this paragraph should be traced to that underlying primary source before publication rather than cited to the aggregator alone.

5–7 September — The tanker war escalated sharply: the US struck three Iranian oil tankers, and Iran retaliated by hitting tankers and firing a ballistic missile toward US warships patrolling near Hormuz — an exchange Al Jazeera reported Iranian officials framing as an “existential war” with the United States. Tehran subsequently signalled plans for a new, Iran-controlled shipping corridor near the strait; Washington maintained the waterway was “fully open,” even as transit volumes fell.

22–26 September — Intensive diplomacy convened in New York around the UN General Assembly — corroborated by UN reporting that the IMO had verified 80 attacks in and around the strait, with at least 22 seafarers killed by 16 September, and that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed Tehran had conveyed a seven-day Hormuz reopening plan through Qatar.

Araghchi separately met US envoy Steve Witkoff, described by Witkoff as “promising, constructive” talks, though without a breakthrough. On 24 September, Iran reportedly presented a wider roadmap proposing a regional ceasefire of up to 60 days, a phased reopening of Hormuz and an end to the US blockade — giving Washington a five-day deadline to respond, per secondary reporting — while separately warning it would extend the war into the Indian Ocean if US strikes resumed. On 26 September, Trump rejected the seven-day Iranian plan to reopen the strait.

The War in Numbers

Three figures anchor everything above: what it has cost, what it has done to oil markets, and who has paid the human price.

Each chart’s data points are drawn from named outlets (CSIS, CBS, CNN, IEA, CNBC) rather than invented, but several — particularly the cost and casualty figures — reach the named outlet via MilitarySpend.org’s trackers, an aggregator rather than a primary source.

Before publication, each figure below should be re-confirmed against the original CSIS, Pentagon, CRS or IEA release rather than cited to the tracker alone.

Cumulative estimated cost to US taxpayers at five Pentagon/CSIS-confirmed milestones. The daily rate fell sharply after the opening weeks as the US shifted from cruise missiles to cheaper gravity bombs.

Source: CSIS Day 6/12 update · Stars and Stripes (May 12) · CBS News (Jul 21) · CNN (Sep 18)

How early-phase spending broke down by category, per CSIS’s first-100-hours analysis. Munitions and interceptors dwarfed every other cost line.

Source: CSIS: first 100 hours · MilitarySpend.org cost tracker

Brent crude’s front-month futures price at four points in the crisis. Prices have eased from the March peak but remain well above pre-war levels.

Source: IEA Oil Market Report, Apr 2026 · CNN Business (Apr 19) · CNBC (Aug 17)

Reported US military and Lebanese civilian casualties. Disputed Iranian and Iraqi militia casualty figures are not included — see the note below.

Source: Task & Purpose: DCAS wounded count · MilitarySpend.org casualties tracker

Where Things Stand — Verified Through 26 September 2026

Nearly seven months after the opening strike, the war has reportedly been declared over twice by Washington — once at the 8 April ceasefire, once in the 1 May War Powers letter — and resumed both times.

The Islamabad Memorandum, the closest either side came to a negotiated settlement, reportedly lasted barely three weeks before the July tanker attacks unravelled it. The Strait of Hormuz remains the war’s unresolved centre of gravity: UN reporting confirms the strait has seen at least 80 verified attacks on shipping and 22 seafarer deaths as of mid-September, oil markets continue to react to every diplomatic signal out of New York, and a war originally framed around decapitating Iran’s leadership and destroying its missile and naval capacity has settled into an attritional contest over who controls a 33-kilometre-wide shipping lane.

Diplomatic contacts continue as this piece goes to press, with technical-level talks reported ongoing in New York. Given the pattern of the past six months, any agreement reached there will need to survive rather more than a signing ceremony to count as an end to the war.