Kharg Island has stopped being a hypothetical target. Since the war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran began in February 2026, the island has moved from strategic footnote to the center of the conflict. On July 7, U.S. Central Command carried out what it called a large-scale precision strike on Kharg, hitting more than 90 Iranian military sites — naval mine storage, missile bunkers, and other assets tied to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — while deliberately avoiding the oil terminals themselves. At a NATO summit days later, President Trump said the U.S. had struck the island and could “take it over.”
Bill Mitchell believes this and it’s worth looking at:
🇺🇸 🇮🇷 COULD LETTING THE ARABS TAKE KHARG ISLAND WHILE AMERICA OWNS THE SKY BE THE MOVE THAT BREAKS IRAN?!
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) July 18, 2026
Here is the play almost nobody is talking about.
Kharg Island is the jugular. Nearly all of Iran's oil flows through that one 20 mile patch of rock, close to 90 percent of… pic.twitter.com/bKhxsyoqmT
My take: The economic logic behind the target is straightforward and well-documented. Roughly 90 to 96 percent of Iran’s crude exports move through Kharg’s terminals, which can load multiple supertankers simultaneously at up to 7 million barrels a day. The leverage is not theoretical: market-tracking data showed Kharg went 12 straight days without loading any crude during blockade conditions in late May, evidence that sustained pressure on the island can throttle Iranian export revenue almost completely when enforced.
The proposed answer — let the countries Iran has attacked directly carry the ground fight, while American and allied airpower handles suppression from above — has real appeal. It avoids the political nonstarter of American ground casualties while pairing regional grievance with regional manpower. Saudi Arabia’s large, well-equipped force and the UAE’s smaller but highly capable “Little Sparta” units, honed by real combat experience in Yemen and Afghanistan, are the obvious building blocks.
But the plan assumes a level of Gulf unity that the current landscape doesn’t support. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent 2026 drifting apart, not together. The two have backed opposing sides in both Yemen and Sudan, and a December 2025 Saudi strike on an Emirati weapons shipment — which Riyadh said was headed to separatists — prompted the UAE to pull its own forces out of Yemen entirely. In April, the UAE broke from Riyadh again, exiting OPEC to set its own oil policy in the middle of the war. A joint ground assault on a heavily defended island requires the kind of unified command structure that Saudi-UAE relations currently lack.
Iran, for its part, isn’t waiting for that coalition to form. Iran has endured sanctions for decades. It is used to be resourceful and thinking outside the box. Iranian missiles struck two UAE-flagged tankers in Omani waters in mid-July, killing a crew member — evidence Tehran already treats the UAE as a combatant, coalition or not.
The broader war underscores how fragile any calm would be. An April 8 ceasefire, extended indefinitely two weeks later, collapsed in early July after Iran struck commercial vessels near Hormuz. CENTCOM’s retaliatory strikes ran for over a week afterward, oil prices crossed $80 a barrel, and analysts have described the resulting disruption as among the largest oil-market shocks on record.
The strategic case for choking Kharg is sound — Washington’s own targeting priorities confirm it. What’s missing isn’t the rationale. It’s the coalition capable of executing the ground half of the plan.