Anatomy of the 2026 war: ended three times, still firing

The official calendar says the war ended two months ago. This morning's wires say Iranian missiles hit commercial vessels, including a Qatari tanker. Both sentences are true, and that is precisely the problem. This dossier is about the gap between "it's over" and whatever is still being launched.

This page is the mother file for the 2026 war on this site. Every claim traces to a source, every number comes as a range, and wherever the fog is thick, we write: fog.

The timeline, unretouched

• February 28, 2026 — US and Israeli airstrikes open the war. Ali Khamenei is killed on day one, along with thousands of IRGC personnel. The American codename: Operation Epic Fury — a title that sounds like it cleared a studio marketing meeting rather than a war room. That small detail is not a joke in passing; it tells you which audience this war was staged for from the start.
• Early March — Mojtaba Khamenei becomes Supreme Leader. A republic that spent half a century denouncing hereditary monarchy performs hereditary succession in two weeks. Full story in the succession file.
• June 14/17 — the memorandum: announced on the 14th, signed on the 17th. Trump signs at the Palace of Versailles, President Pezeshkian in Tehran. A peace so elegant it required a French royal palace.
• June 18 — the Strait of Hormuz reopens, one day after the signing. The fastest-implemented clause of the entire arrangement, and the only one you could read off an oil chart.
• June 28 — the US and Iran agree to cease attacks. Eleven days after the signing of the "memorandum of understanding." Hold on to that gap.
• July 6 — Trump threatens to destroy Iranian infrastructure.
• July 7 — today — Iranian missiles strike commercial shipping, including the Qatari tanker.

A war with three endings

Ending one: May 5, the formal end of the operation. Ending two: June 17, Versailles. Ending three: June 28, the cessation of attacks. Three endings in two months — followed by a threat on the 6th and missiles on the 7th.

Here is the analytical core: each "ending" required a new document because the previous document had not ended the thing it claimed to end. A memorandum was signed — yet stopping the actual attacks needed a separate agreement eleven days later. In other words, the signatories knew better than anyone what they had not signed. We opened a ceasefire dictionary for exactly this vocabulary, and a running "war is over" tracker for every declared ending and the incident that followed it — a file that, regrettably, keeps needing updates.

The invoice

Casualties, by source and therefore as ranges: Iran 3,468 to over 6,000; Israel 69; the US 17; Saudi Arabia 17 civilians; the UAE 13; Kuwait 11; Hezbollah 1,000 to 2,500. We keep the ranges deliberately — in a war where every side treats statistics as ammunition, a precise number is itself a claim.

Economically: roughly $270 billion in direct and indirect damage — per an estimate in a UK House of Commons Library briefing — against an Iranian GDP the IMF puts near $300 billion. Nearly one full year of an entire national economy. Who pays that invoice, and who profited from issuing it, is accounted for in Who won the invoice?

The grammar of pressure

From the Hormuz blockade to today's missiles, one pattern repeats: nobody in this story speaks in words. They speak in straits, tankers and threats. That language is parsed in Hormuz: the grammar of pressure.

The files in this cluster

This page is the hub; follow the branches: the Versailles memorandum, the "war is over" tracker, Hormuz, the invoice, and the ceasefire dictionary. The war may be over. The file is not.