Iran says four ships hit mines in Hormuz as UN warns war worsened repression

BBC News reported that Iran's Revolutionary Guards said four tankers hit mines and caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz. The Guards said the ships were trying to pass through the strait's southern route. They challenged the United States to prove it had cleared the mines.

BBC News said the claim came a day after the US said it had cleared all mines from what it called primary transit routes in the waterway. Traffic through the strait has been severely restricted since the war began. It has pushed up oil prices and inflation around the world.

BBC News reported that Qatar had signed a 20-year deal to import gas from the US. Before the war Qatar was one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas. Analysts said the long-term deal suggested Qatar expected the crisis in the strait to drag on.

Parham Ghobadi, from the BBC's Persian language service, said Tehran and Washington were fighting a battle over narrative. He said Iran reported vessels hitting mines almost daily while the US called the stories fake. BBC News reported that the British maritime security agency UKMTO confirmed one incident near Omani waters near Khasab. A dhow caught fire and sank. It was not known whether that dhow was one of the four vessels Iran described.

BBC News also reported that US Vice President JD Vance had written to Mohsen Rezaie, secretary of Iran's national supreme security council. Iranian officials confirmed receiving a letter. Donald Trump said it was not about peace talks and was focused on getting medical supplies into Iran.

BBC News reported that Mai Sato, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, said the war had made repression inside the country worse. Her report covered February to August this year, after protests across Iran and the start of US and Israeli strikes. She said the population faced military strikes and threats, arrests, torture, forced disappearances and executions by its own authorities in the same weeks and cities. Sometimes this happened in the same families.

Sato said external aggression and internal repression had compounded each other. She said the war had delivered nothing to the people of Iran, not safety, not rights, not freedom. She said it had brought intensified repression, executions that did not pause, multiplied arrests and fear.

Iran's representative denounced the investigation as politically motivated. He accused the United States and Israel of interfering in Iran's affairs. He described a campaign that included military aggression, deliberate fomenting of unrest, terrorist groups along Iran's borders and economic strangulation.