Strait Of Hormuz Crisis, Gas Price Politics, Iranian School Strike Investigation

0:02Noel King:President Trump says there's, quote, practically nothing left to target in Iran as U.S. and Israeli airstrikes continued on Tehran overnight.

0:09Rachel Martin:Iran is losing the war in the air, but on the water has strangled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

0:14Noel King:I'm Leila Fadil, that's Stephen Skeep, and this is Up First from NPR News. Gas prices are rising because of the war, and President Trump, who campaigned on bringing them down, is now calling it a very small price to pay. is at a price Americans are willing to accept.

0:31Rachel Martin:Also, military investigators say the U.S. is responsible for a missile strike on a girls' school that killed at least 165 civilians. NPR learned the school was walled off from a nearby military base years ago. Why did the U.S. cut back on an office that helped to limit civilian casualties? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

0:57Noel King:This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get WISE. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. One of the hot spots in the war in the Middle East is the Strait of Hormuz.

1:19Rachel Martin:Yeah, there, in the last 24 hours, Iran struck several commercial ships. Images of one ship in the Persian Gulf area show plumes of smoke rising above it. The important passage for a lot of the world's oil is effectively closed, and Iran, therefore, seems to have gained an advantage in the war at sea, even while losing the war in the air. NPR National Security correspondent Greg Meiria is covering all this. Greg, good morning.

1:44Noel King:Hi, Steve. Where do you think the campaign stands? Well, Iran's air defenses have been so decimated that the U.S. and the Israelis are sending warplanes over Iran whenever they wish with minimal risk at this point. The Pentagon says the U.S. has hit more than 5 ,000 targets, so we're talking close to 500 a day. President Trump is sending a bit of a mixed message. He's suggesting the war could end soon because, as he said in an interview, there's practically nothing left to hit. But he's also said the U.S. needs to stay to finish the job. So the U.S. and Israel could carry out these airstrikes indefinitely, but they could be approaching a point of diminishing returns when there's a limited number of targets left.

2:27Rachel Martin:Why is the story so different when we move out to sea?

2:31Noel King:Well, the Iranians have a very strong hold over the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. has sunk most of Iran's navy, including mine-laying ships, but Iran still has other ways to hit these oil tankers and cargo ships. The Strait of Harbuz is just 20 miles wide or so at its narrowest point, and Iranian forces can fire drones or rockets or missiles at passing ships. And as you mentioned, several ships have been hit in the last 24 hours.

2:59Rachel Martin:What is the impact of all that, the economic impact?

3:02Noel King:Yes, Steve, we're seeing higher oil prices. They're flirting with$100 a barrel today in the latest surge upward. The world consumes a little over 100 million barrels of oil a day. Around 20 million of those barrels, or 20%, come through the strait, and the pressure on oil prices will just keep growing every day. Gregory Brew follows Iran and energy issues at the Eurasia Group. He spoke on a panel hosted by the Cato Institute. We are currently experiencing what is the largest oil supply disruption in history. Energy prices will remain high. the Iranian strategy of applying pressure to the United States will continue to play out, and President Trump will continue to feel the pressure.

3:45Rachel Martin:Greg, there's been a lot of crises in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. To hear someone say this is the largest disruption in history, that's news to me. Wow. How long can Iran keep this up?

3:55Noel King:Yeah, we don't know. But Iran's strategy may be to keep the strait closed as long as possible, to inflict as much economic pain as possible, with the goal of deterring the U.S. and Israel from hitting Iran again in the future. Here's Nagar Murtazavi with the Center for International Policy in Washington. For Iran, they're essentially playing the long game. The war continues until they achieve a ceasefire or a peace that ensures they don't become the next Lebanon or the next Gaza, where Israel, with the help of the U.S., feel like they can just come in and mow the lawn. And Steve, as you know, that phrase, mow the lawn, is how Israel often describes its periodic attacks in Gaza or in Lebanon.

4:36Rachel Martin:The U.S. initially said its goal was to stop Iran from getting a bomb. Are they doing that?

4:40Noel King:Trump keeps saying Iran will never get a nuclear bomb, but we're just not getting much information on whether the military is targeting nuclear sites, which Trump said were obliterated last year. Now, the biggest single question is the status of nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium. Nuclear experts believe this is buried inside a site outside the central city of Isfahan, and this material would be the critical component for a bomb. But international inspectors haven't been to Iran since the U.S.-Israeli attacks last June. It's not clear if the U.S. and Israel want to bomb this site again, or possibly send in ground troops to seize it, or negotiate its removal after the war.

5:23Rachel Martin:Okay. NPR's Greg Meirey, thanks so much.

5:25Noel King:Sure thing, Steve.

5:34Noel King:The Trump administration is tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to bring down gas prices. Those prices have spiked since President Trump launched the war with Iran.

5:44Rachel Martin:According to the popular app GasBuddy, the gas station is not your friend lately. The average cost of regular unleaded is now up to$3.61 per gallon. The president has described this as a very small price to pay for safety and peace. and he becomes the latest president to tap this emergency supply of oil that the United States stores underground in multiple sites in Texas and Louisiana. NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith is covering this. Tam, good morning.

6:11Ayesha Rascoe:Good morning.

6:11Rachel Martin:How much oil is coming out and how soon?

6:13Ayesha Rascoe:The announcement was 172 million barrels over four months starting next week. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on Fox News last night to talk about it.

6:24Noel King:The releases, certainly out of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, they'll go over about four months. But this conflict, I don't think, goes that long. I think we will have the Straits of Hormuz open well before then. Exactly when, you know, I can't say, but we are working 24 hours of every day to get there.

6:43Ayesha Rascoe:But as he makes clear, this isn't really a quick fix. It's a play President Biden tried after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 disrupted oil markets. Back then, gas got to$5 a gallon, Consumers were mad. Jared Bernstein was on the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and he says there was a lot of pressure from the president and everyone else to find a fix. But he says tapping the reserve only brought prices down a little.

7:11Rachel Martin:And reduced the price at the pump by maybe 20, 25 cents a gallon, which made a difference to people. But it certainly didn't change how they were feeling about that increase and how it really took a big dent off of their impression of the overall economy. I looked this up and I can see why it doesn't make a big difference. 172 million barrels to be released is a lot of oil. But we heard Greg Myrie say about 20 million per day is being stopped from going through the Strait of Hormuz. So the world is going to use up that extra oil in a matter of a few days. So how's the president talking about this situation?

7:46Ayesha Rascoe:Yeah, he was at a campaign rally yesterday in Kentucky where he tried to put a positive spin on this challenging situation.

7:54Noel King:But oil prices are already coming back down and it's going to come down. But we're not leaving until that job is finished.

8:01Ayesha Rascoe:And then the oil markets immediately contradicted him. Prices surged overnight. You know, in recent days, Trump has called the war a short term excursion, signaling markets that maybe the conflict could end soon. But this is all a sharp turn from the way Trump talked about gas prices before the war, when he took every opportunity to boast about$2 gas, even if he was exaggerating. In fact, bringing down gas prices was something he campaigned on and was a key way he talked about addressing affordability as president.

8:34Rachel Martin:Where is this all going, Tim?

8:36Ayesha Rascoe:Well, I called up former Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore yesterday, and he said Trump is making a bet that this conflict really will be short, prices will come back down, and voters will forgive or forget.

8:49Noel King:Part of the problem for President Trump is that we already had people complaining about prices.

8:55Ayesha Rascoe:He said the risk is if this drags on, there will be spillover effects to the rest of the economy, with other things that people need getting more expensive because of fuel costs. The political challenge is that Americans see the price of gas every few blocks on big lighted signs. And when prices go up, people feel it. Republicans have to hope that gas prices aren't a big factor come this November when they will be defending their majorities in both the House and the Senate. It's a midterm campaign where affordability was already the top issue.

9:30Rachel Martin:And Paris Tamara Keith, thanks so much. You're welcome.

9:41Noel King:A preliminary assessment by the Pentagon has determined the U.S. is at fault for a missile strike on a school in Iran on the first day of the war. The attack killed at least 165 civilians, mostly children, according to Iranian officials.

9:56Rachel Martin:We have a description of the U.S. investigation findings from a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak publicly. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf is here. Kat, good morning.

10:06Ayesha Rascoe:Hey, good morning.

10:07Rachel Martin:What is this investigation?

10:09Ayesha Rascoe:So now the Pentagon has opened what's called a 15-6 investigation to determine not if the U.S. did this, but how the mistake happened and also confirm that it was indeed civilians who were killed. That's expected to take months. In a statement, the White House reiterated to NPR that the investigation is ongoing and, quote, the United States does not target civilians. But if this is all confirmed, Steve, it would make this one of the highest, if not the highest, number of civilians killed by the U.S. in a single incident in 35 years.

10:37Rachel Martin:Granting that they're still investigating, how could this have happened?

10:41Ayesha Rascoe:Well, NPR was the first to report that the strike on the school was part of a larger precision strike on a compound of buildings and was likely the result of outdated intelligence. Our colleague Jeff Brumfield reported that a previous map of targets in Iran showed that the building housing the school was once part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base in the southern city of Manab. But somewhere between 2013 and 2016, the school was separated and walled off from that base, according to satellite imagery that we've reviewed.