On Easter day, April 5th, at 1:03 PM, President Trump posted on his social media channel the following post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. TRUMP.” The Iranians responded by saying that promising to commit war crimes won’t do good for the cause: if civilian targets are attacked, the Iranian response against all the countries in the region will be even stronger than before. They also added that the Strait will never return to what it was before the war began.

While Pakistan says that the two sides are exchanging messages, perhaps to advance some form of mediation, the rhetoric is clearly getting harder, promising more escalation, rather than de-escalation. Trump is clearly threatening “Hell on Earth” if the Iranians don’t open up the Strait, while at the same time unilaterally postponing – once again – his self-imposed deadline from the 6th to the 7th of April.But the Iranians don’t seem likely to back down. As we have discussed before, why should they give him an off-ramp at this stage?

The US has successfully conducted a “search and rescue operation,” to recover the second pilot that ejected from the F-15 that was downed by the Iranians last week. But in the mission, they lost at least two C130 aircrafts and one helicopter. The Iranians are now advancing doubts that the operation was actually aimed at rescuing the pilot.

The Iranians are claiming that the fact that the pilot was picked up at Isfahan, close to the nuclear plant where the enriched Iranian uranium is considered to have been stored/buried after the June 2025 bombing campaign, raises the question of whether the real target of the operation was in fact the seizure of Iran’s uranium. In effect, the number of resources employed for the mission (at least three C130s, plus several other aircrafts, drones, etc) may suggest that the aim of the mission may have been different – and in reality, one of the few points scored for which Trump, if the uranium is recovered, could actually “claim victory and go home.”

Having said all this, the situation is as tense as ever. The Israelis have just killed the new head of the Iranian intelligence service, and are saying they will continue killing everybody in the chain of command. Conversely, the Iranians apparently found a way of restoring artillery hit by the raids: by using excavators, they are able to dig out the launch platforms just hit by the bombs and make them operational within hours, so long as they are not excessively damaged. This would explain why at least half of Iran’s offensive capabilities are still in place, when the US-Israeli forces claimed they had been obliterated.

In any case, it’s obvious the war in the Middle East is at a crossroads. The next few days will tell which direction it will take.