Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes on Houthi targets in the Yemeni port city of Hodeida and a nearby island on Friday, after the Iran-backed group announced a maritime blockade and attacked Saudi ships.

Saudi authorities later issued emergency alerts for the province of Jizan as the Houthis claimed responsibility for a missile attack on the city of Jizan.

Early on Saturday, the Houthis’ Ansarollah media said on Telegram that a “Yemeni missile strike” had caused fires in the Saudi city of Jizan.

Meanwhile in the Strait of Hormuz, the US military said on Friday it had fired on and disabled a tanker ship in the Gulf of Oman that was attempting to evade the American blockade on Iranian ports.

The vessel attacked by the US is the second commercial ship the US has disabled since it reimposed its blockade earlier this month.

“We disabled the tanker after the crew attempted to run the blockade at least four times prior,” Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

“The crew was repeatedly warned, didn’t comply, and US forces on scene disabled the ship after firing into its engine room,” he said. “The ship is no longer transiting to Iran.”

Earlier, a delegation from Oman arrived in Iran’s capital Tehran for talks on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported. Oman controls the strait’s southern coastline.

The US and Iran have traded fire for almost two weeks, with Iran on Friday saying it had carried out drone strikes on US military facilities and bases across the Middle East in retaliation for the 13th consecutive night of American attacks on the country.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday afternoon, Trump continued to threaten further attacks while saying that negotiations were continuing.

“We are talking to them. I think they’re being serious. I think … they are being by far the most serious that we’ve seen them, but that doesn’t mean we get there,” he said.

Asked about his exit strategy for the Iran war, Trump said: “There’s a military exit where we just keep going just the way we are, and we can even make it a heavier dose, and it’s knocking out everything they have. Or there’s a smarter strategy that you make a deal.”

But he added: “We’re locked and loaded. We’re ready to go.”

Growing concern over new threats to shipping in the Red Sea from Yemen’s Houthis helped push the price of crude oil back over $100 (£74.96) a barrel this week – the highest level since May.

But it dropped again on Friday afternoon, with Brent futures down more than US$4 (£3.00) to a little over $96 (£72.07), according to the Reuters news agency, which reported the fall occurred after the successful passage through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait by two Chinese-chartered supertankers.

Following the exchange of fire early on Saturday, the Houthis’ Ansarollah media posted on Telegram, “The Saudi enemy’s targeting of civilian facilities in Hodeida and Kamaran island constitutes a dangerous escalation,” adding: “We affirm that these recent crimes will not go unanswered.”

Saudi authorities did not immediately respond.

The US and UK are set to hold a conference in London next week to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, the BBC understands. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine will attend the conference, which was first reported by Axios.

It comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet the US president at the White House on Tuesday.

In June, the US and Iran agreed on a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to halt military operations and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to reach an agreement to end the war over the following 60 days.

But three weeks after it was signed, Trump declared the ceasefire “over” after Iranian attacks on ships in the strait, and US strikes in response.

The Pentagon’s public-facing casualty database has not been updated in more than a day after its number of wounded and killed in the Iran war abruptly shifted and continues to undercount the number of the conflict’s casualties, with Defense Department officials attributing the discrepancies to a technical snafu.

The discrepancy raises questions about whether the Pentagon’s underlying systems for tracking casualties across military operations may have been impacted by the Trump administration’s previous statements that Operation Epic Fury, which was used as the namesake for the Iran war, had ended in May.

The U.S. airstrikes targeting Iran since that date are being “referred to as ‘overseas operations,” a U.S. official told ABC News, a vague description that would be an unconventional label for a war, and subsequently makes it unclear how the war dead and wounded would be counted. 

The situation has sparked backlash from lawmakers, who say the administration is obfuscating the casualty count and is trying to skirt the 60-day limit on military action without congressional authorization by rebranding the war.

The ledger of Americans killed and wounded in any conflict has long been viewed as the clearest measure of a war’s true cost, and a fundamental test of government transparency. 

“Accurate casualty reporting is the one link most Americans have to the true cost of war, especially because it’s borne almost entirely by the less than 1% who serve and their families,” Alex Wagner, who served as the assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs during the Biden administration, told ABC News.   

The U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that started a 60-day negotiating period in June, but earlier this month, Trump declared that the ceasefire was over, precipitating exchanges of fire and more recently nearly two weeks of consecutive nightly strikes.

The public casualty database has previously posted shifting casualty figures since the war began, but the discrepancies reached a crescendo Thursday when the reported death toll fell from 18 to 14, effectively removing the four U.S. service members killed in Jordan and Iraq since daily fighting renewed.

The number of wounded troops listed in the database dropped from 482 on Wednesday to 420 on Thursday. 

As of Friday evening, those figures remain uncorrected. 

The revised figures also appear to conflict with the Pentagon’s own recent public statements. On Monday, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said nearly 100 additional U.S. troops had been wounded since July 7, when daily fighting resumed after the collapse of a fragile ceasefire. At no point did the database reflect that increase.

The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, is the Pentagon’s primary public repository for tracking U.S. military casualties from current and past conflicts. The Defense Department maintains the database using casualty data submitted by the military services, and it serves as the federal government’s authoritative public record of war dead. 

Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez said the website was experiencing technical issues. 

“The Department of Defense is aware of temporary data disruptions on the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) website,” Valdez said in a statement. “These site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the military services.” 

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on detailed questions about how such a data issue was possible and why the numbers had not been corrected.

It remains unclear whether Pentagon officials consider the resumption of daily fighting to mark the start of a new military campaign. 

There are also separate ongoing operations, such as Operation Inherent Resolve, the military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which included a U.S. presence in the region before the Iran war began.

Troops already deployed under that mission may technically fall under a separate operation on paper, including some of the soldiers killed in recent days. But parsing out individual phases of a war from the broader campaign in this way would be unprecedented.

Major U.S. military conflicts have historically evolved through distinct phases, with the scope and intensity of operations changing over time, but those shifts have not resulted in separate casualty categories being treated as separate wars.

In a letter to Congress on May 1, President Donald Trump wrote that Operation Epic Fury, which the administration has used as Iran War’s namesake, had been “terminated.” On May 5, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at a White House briefing that Operation Epic Fury “was over”.  

But the resumption of almost daily airstrikes that began on July 6 as the ceasefire with Iran fell apart has led to questions as to whether casualties over the last two weeks are being tracked separately. Such a split would be unprecedented.

On Thursday, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said in a social media post on X “The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire.”  Massie described that possibility as an “absurd ruse” intended to avoid the 60-day deadline imposed by the War Powers Resolution, which calls for congressional authorization of U.S. military conflicts.  

Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats on Thursday pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to explain the Pentagon’s casualty reporting, demanding a “full and accurate accounting” of every U.S. service member killed and wounded since the Iran war began.

“The American people, Congress, service members, and their families are entitled to a full and accurate accounting of the human costs of war,” the letter led by Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and signed by the 11 other Democrats on the panel, read. “The information currently available to the public suggests that the department has not consistently provided timely and comprehensive public casualty reporting throughout the conflict.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was “outraged” to see the name of Sgt. Angel Rampersad, one of the four soldiers who was killed in recent days, and a New York native, “removed” from the database.

“The Trump administration does not get to revise the human cost of this war because it has become politically inconvenient,” she said in a statement. “Sgt. Rampersad gave her life in service to this country. Changing a website does not rewrite the truth of her sacrifice.”

The three other service members who were killed in recent attacks were Pfc. Isabella Gonzales, 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan and Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton.

The accounting issues come after Trump earlier this week appeared to downplay the human cost of the Iran conflict, posting on social media a comparison of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and Korea — wars that spanned years and claimed thousands of American lives — alongside the Iran campaign, a five-month conflict fought through missile attacks and drones rather than traditional ground combat.

Trump’s post said that 18 American troops had died in the Iran war.