"Violence Will Be Met With Violence": How Three Ships, Two Weekends, and a Disputed Clause in an MOU Are Threatening to Unravel the US-Iran Peace Deal

The agreement signed on June 17, 2026 — the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran that was presented to the world as the formal beginning of the end of the 108-day war that began on February 28 — has survived nine days. In those nine days, Iran struck a Singapore-registered container ship, the Ever Lovely, with drones in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States responded with airstrikes on Iranian missile and drone storage sites and coastal radar positions. Iran struck again, hitting the Panama-flagged M/T Kiku oil tanker. The United States struck again. Iran then struck US military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain. Both sides declared the other in violation of the ceasefire. And a UN maritime agency that had begun moving stranded vessels out of the Strait via an alternative Omani coastal route suspended those operations after Thursday's attack and said it would not resume without guarantees of safety — guarantees that neither the United States nor Iran appears currently capable of providing.

The weekend of June 26 to 28, 2026, is the most dangerous period in the US-Iran de-escalation process since the April ceasefire was established, and it is dangerous in a specific and structurally revealing way: not because one side has definitively broken the agreement and signalled its intention to resume major combat operations, but because both sides are simultaneously claiming to be defending the agreement against the other's violations while conducting military strikes that the other side characterises as the violations being complained about. The loop is not merely absurd. It is operationally dangerous, because each round of strikes creates domestic pressure in both Tehran and Washington to respond, and each response creates the next round of domestic pressure, in a cycle that the MOU's text was apparently not sufficiently precise to interrupt.

The sequence began on Thursday, June 26, when Iranian forces launched a drone attack on the Ever Lovely, a Singapore-flagged container ship transiting near the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump responded from the Oval Office with a statement describing the attack as "obviously, this is a foolish violation of our ceasefire agreement." The language was measured in its formulation of the characterisation — "foolish" rather than declaratory of war — but unambiguous in its conclusion: Iran had broken the deal. US Central Command launched airstrikes on Friday, targeting what it described as Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites, calling the operation "a powerful response to yesterday's attack on a commercial ship that was transiting the Strait of Hormuz" and describing Iranian conduct as "unwarranted aggression against commercial shipping" that "clearly violated the ceasefire."

Vice President JD Vance posted on X on Friday evening in language that was both a statement of position and a warning about what would follow if Iran did not change course. "Iran signed a ceasefire agreement. We have honored it," Vance wrote. "If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone. But violence will be met with violence." The phrase "pick up the phone" was simultaneously an invitation to diplomatic resolution and an implicit acknowledgment of the specific problem at the centre of the entire weekend's escalation: the Supreme Leader of Iran is hiding in an undisclosed location communicating through courier networks, as CBS News reported earlier this month, and the governance dysfunction that creates means that "picking up the phone" is precisely what Iran's decision-making architecture is currently not structured to enable on short notice.

Iran's response to the Friday American strikes was immediate and emphatic in its own framing. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a statement saying it had "struck the positions of the US terrorist army in the region" in retaliation for what it characterised as American aggression. The IRGC's statement invoked a specific clause of the Islamabad MOU — Clause 5 — in its justification, arguing that the arrangements for controlling passage in the Strait of Hormuz are, under that clause, vested in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that the United States by provoking vessels to transit through what Iran considers an unauthorised route had itself violated its commitments. "According to Clause 5 of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, the arrangements for controlling passage in the Strait of Hormuz are with the Islamic Republic of Iran," the IRGC said. The United States disputes this interpretation entirely, and the gap between those two readings of Clause 5 is the precise legal fault line on which the current escalation is running.

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iran's parliamentary national security commission, offered the most concentrated formulation of the Iranian government's position on Friday. "The Strait of Hormuz is governed by Iran," he wrote on social media. He warned the Trump administration against mistaking "control for escalation" — asserting that what Iran was doing in the Strait was managing the waterway in accordance with its rights under the MOU rather than attacking commercial shipping in violation of it. He said the Thursday attack on the Ever Lovely amounted to "ceasefire management" rather than a breach. This formulation — ceasefire management — is the Iranian government's legal theory for why striking a commercial vessel in the Strait is not a ceasefire violation, and it rests on the proposition that Iran's sovereign right to supervise Strait passage includes the right to use force against vessels transiting through routes it has not authorised. The United States, and virtually every other country whose shipping passes through the Strait, rejects this proposition as inconsistent with both international law and the plain meaning of the ceasefire's commitment to "ensure the security and safety of all commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz."

On Saturday, the escalation took another step. Iran struck the M/T Kiku, a Panama-flagged oil tanker carrying Qatari oil, with a one-way attack drone at 4:30 a.m. Eastern Time. CENTCOM responded with another round of airstrikes. "After yesterday's US strikes in response to the Iranian attack on M/V Ever Lovely, Iran was given a chance to honor the ceasefire agreement but elected not to," CENTCOM said. It was the third time in the space of roughly 72 hours that American warplanes had struck targets in Iran in response to Iranian drone attacks in the Strait. Iran's foreign ministry then declared the US strikes "an explicit violation of the first paragraph of the Memorandum of Understanding," calling for the international community's condemnation. Bahrain — whose waters Iran's drone operations came near enough to generate a formal Bahraini condemnation — added its own voice to the chorus of regional concern.

Early Sunday morning Iran time, the IRGC announced it had struck US military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain in retaliation for the Saturday American strikes. "If the aggression is repeated, our response will be broader than this," the IRGC said. The word "broader" carries a specific strategic weight in the context of a war whose opening phase produced strikes deep into Iranian territory, including the killing of the Supreme Leader, and whose ceasefire has been defined in part by the limiting of military action to the Strait corridor. An IRGC warning that its response will be "broader" is a signal that the current pattern of tit-for-tat strikes, if continued, could expand geographically in ways that would constitute a much more serious deterioration than what has happened so far.

The interpretive dispute at the heart of the escalation — what Clause 5 of the Islamabad MOU actually says and means about Strait governance — is a problem that the agreement's drafters appear not to have resolved with sufficient precision to prevent exactly the current conflict. The MOU was signed on June 17 at a ceremony attended by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and witnessed by the Swiss government, which played a facilitating role. It committed both sides to a 60-day period during which a final settlement would be negotiated, with the Strait remaining open to commercial shipping and the US naval blockade being lifted. But the text of the MOU's Clause 5, which Iran is citing as authority for its Strait oversight role, was apparently not drafted with the legal clarity needed to definitively resolve the question of who has the right to determine what constitutes an authorised transit route through the waterway. The IRGC's statement that vessels were using "an unauthorized route" suggests Iran is claiming the right to designate specific lanes within the Strait through which passage is permitted, with vessels deviating from those lanes subject to Iranian enforcement action. The United States and international shipping organisations regard the Strait as an international strait subject to the right of transit passage under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — a right that does not require authorisation from any coastal state and that cannot be revoked by unilateral national designation of prohibited routes.

These are not merely legal technicalities. They are the substantive content of the dispute that is producing deaths, property damage, oil market volatility, and the genuine risk of a return to major combat operations. An oil tanker crew that finds itself on the wrong side of the Iranian Navy's designated transit lanes does not care whether the dispute is ultimately resolved in Iran's favour or the United States' favour under UNCLOS. They care whether a drone is flying toward their vessel.

The Lebanon dimension has added its own layer of complexity to an already overcrowded crisis management space. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a trilateral framework agreement with Israel and Lebanon in Washington on Friday, June 26 — the same day as the US strikes on Iran in the Strait. Iran and Hezbollah both immediately denounced the agreement, with Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem calling it a "humiliation, a disgrace, and a surrender of sovereignty." Iran's position that the Lebanon front is covered by the June 17 MOU — which stipulates an end to military operations "on all fronts, including in Lebanon" — and the US-Israel position that Lebanon is a separate track not governed by the MOU's ceasefire provisions, remains unresolved and continues to generate operational confusion about what the rules of engagement are in a conflict that was never limited to a single front.

The IAEA chief's intervention adds the nuclear dimension that underlies everything. Rafael Grossi, speaking this week, warned that any final US-Iran settlement would need "strong safeguards" to ensure Tehran does not build a nuclear weapon. Iran and Washington have given conflicting accounts of whether IAEA inspectors will regain access to Iran's nuclear facilities under the final agreement — the MOU is not a final agreement, and its provisions on nuclear questions are framed in terms of principles rather than verification protocols. Iran's inflation rate reaching 88.6 percent year-on-year in June, driven by the war's economic destruction, creates additional domestic pressure on the Iranian government that both motivates a deal and constrains the political space in which Iranian negotiators can make concessions that would be perceived domestically as humiliating.

An unnamed US official told CNN after the Friday strikes that they did not constitute a return to major combat operations "for now." The qualifier "for now" is the most important two words in the current strategic situation. The pattern of the past 72 hours — Iran strikes a ship, the US strikes Iranian infrastructure, Iran strikes another ship, the US strikes again, Iran strikes US bases — is a pattern that, if continued, will eventually produce an incident of sufficient severity that one or both governments concludes it constitutes a return to major combat operations regardless of whatever characterisation is offered. The 60-day clock on the MOU's final deal negotiations is ticking. Iran's inflation is at 88 percent. The Supreme Leader is in a bunker communicating through couriers. The Strait is partially open and increasingly dangerous. And Trump, who said twelve days ago that "ships of the world, start your engines," has spent this weekend saying "I don't like the fact that they took a shot yesterday, actually four of them."

The deal is not dead. American officials insist that talks are progressing. Iran's foreign minister has not withdrawn from the negotiating framework. Pakistan, whose diplomatic capital was invested in producing the MOU, is not publicly declaring failure. But the deal is demonstrably not holding in its most immediate operational manifestation — the safe and unrestricted transit of commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — and the military exchanges of the past 72 hours have consumed the goodwill and the strategic bandwidth that final deal negotiations require. The next 60 days will determine whether June 17 is remembered as the beginning of a durable peace or as the agreement that lasted nine days before the guns started again.

Sources

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