Earth Changes · Sep 18, 2026World War 3 Watch: Trump weighs ‘annihilating’ Iranian regime as tanker attacks hit Strait of Hormuz

Earth Changes · World War 3 Watch · September 18, 2026 at 14:01 UTC

Key Facts

• Trump weighs ‘annihilating’ Iranian regime as tanker attacks hit Strait of Hormuz (via news4sanantonio.com)^[1]
• Pakistan pledges full committment to defence of Saudi Arabia (via Al Jazeera)^[2]
• Hormuz Tanker Traffic Slumps as Saudi Arabia Scrambles for New Oil Routes (via oilprice.com)^[3]

Places mentioned: Iran, Oman, U.S., Qatar, Saada, Yanbu, Mecca, Yemen, Sanaa, Medina
Organizations/groups mentioned: STS, NATO, Togo, UKMTO, Islam, Trump, Saudi, Houthi, Saudis, Iranian

Trump weighs ‘annihilating’ Iranian regime as tanker attacks hit Strait of Hormuz

(TNND) — President Donald Trump said on Thursday he faces a “big decision” on whether to launch a major new offensive against Iran’s ruling regime as attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz continue. “I have a big decision coming up,” Trump told Axios. “Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not?^[1]

Pakistan pledges full committment to defence of Saudi Arabia

Assurance comes amid questions over Pakistan and Turkiye’s stance on Riyadh’s fight with Houthis following signing of mutual defence pacts. A senior officer from Pakistan’s military has pledged that his country will defend Saudi Arabia against aggression “to any extent”. Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director-general of the Pakistani military’s media wing, told the Saudi newspaper Arab News on Thursday that Islamabad stands with Saudi Arabia diplomatically and physically.^[2]

Hormuz Tanker Traffic Slumps as Saudi Arabia Scrambles for New Oil Routes

Argentina’s oil output hit a… The total number of active… Only four commodity vessels were detected to have moved inbound or out of the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, shipping data showed early on Friday, while oil shipping options out of the Middle East became fewer with the closure of the Saudi pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Three vessels moved into the Persian Gulf, and one exited the Strait on Thursday, down from the 10-day average of as many as 16 ships daily transiting the chokepoint, according to preliminary data from Kpler cited by Reuters. The tracking excludes any movements of ships that have switched off their positioning systems to avoid detection or becoming targets of attacks.^[3]

References

1. news4sanantonio.com. Trump weighs ‘annihilating’ Iranian regime as tanker attacks hit Strait of Hormuz. ↩
2. Al Jazeera. Pakistan pledges full committment to defence of Saudi Arabia. ↩
3. oilprice.com. Hormuz Tanker Traffic Slumps as Saudi Arabia Scrambles for New Oil Routes. ↩

Investigative methodology: this update was produced by scripts/ww3_monitor.py, a keyword-and-entity
heuristic (see scripts/significance.py) — not a language model. It quotes and links each source verbatim
and does not add analysis or interpretation.