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

President Trump says there's, quote, practically nothing left to target in Iran as US and Israeli airstrikes continued on Tehran overnight.

Iran is losing the war in the air, but on the water has strangled traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

I'm Leila Fadel. That's Stephen Scheepe, 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 that a price Americans are willing to accept.

Also, military investigators say the US 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 US 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.

One of the hotspots in the war in the Middle East is the Strait of Hormuz.

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 Myri is covering all this. Greg, good morning. Hi, Steve. Where do you think the campaign stands?

Well, Iran's air defenses have been so decimated that the US and the Israelis are sending warplanes over Iran whenever they wish with minimal risk at this point. The Pentagon says that the US 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 US needs to stay to finish the job. The US 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.

Why is the story so different when we move out to sea?

Well, the Iranians have a very strong hold over the Strait of Hormuz. The US has sunk most of Iran's Navy, including mining ships, but Iran still has other ways to hit these oil tankers and cargo ships. The Strait of Hormuz 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.

What is the impact of all that, the economic impact?

Yes, Steve, we're seeing higher oil prices. They're floating 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 straight, 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. 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?

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 US and Israel from hitting Iran again in the future. Here's Nagar Mortazavi 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 US, feel like they can just come in and mow the lawn.

Steve, as you know, that phrase, Mow the lawn, is how Israel often describes its periodic attacks in Gaza or in Lebanon.

The US initially said its goal was to stop Iran from getting a bomb. Are they doing that?

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 US Israeli attacks last June. It's not clear if the US and Israel want to bomb this site again or possibly send in ground troops to seize it or negotiate its removal after the war.

Okay. Nprs Greg Myri, thanks so much.

Sure thing, Steve.

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.

According to the popular app Gas Buddy, the gas station is not your friend lately. The average cost of regular unletded 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. Morning. How much oil is coming out and how soon?

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.

The releases, certainly out of the US 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 Hormu's open well before then. Exactly when, I can't say, but we are working 24 hours of every day to get there.

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.

And reduced the price of the pump by maybe 20, 25 cents a gallon, which made a difference to people. But 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 Hormu's. 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?

Yeah, He was at a campaign rally yesterday in Kentucky, where he tried to put a positive spin on this challenging situation.

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.

Then the oil markets immediately contradicted him. Prices surged overnight. 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 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.

Where is this all going, Tim?

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.

Part of the problem for President Trump is that we already had people complaining about prices.

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 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.

And Paris, tamer, Keith, thanks so much.

You're welcome. A preliminary assessment by the Pentagon has determined the US is at fault for a 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.

We have a description of the US investigation findings from a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak publicly. Npr's Kat Lonsdorff is here. Kat, good morning. Hey, good morning. What is this investigation?

Now the Pentagon has opened what's called the 15/6 investigation to determine not if the US did this, but how the mistake happened, and also confirmed 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, 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 US in a single incident in 35 years.

Granting that they're still investigating, how could this have happened?

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.

Just makes you cringe to think about it. Then there's these videos which appear to show a Tomahawk missile hitting the compound. What do you learn from that.

Yeah, Iran also published images of parts of the missile it says struck the school. Those appear to have come from a Tomahawk as well. Tomahawks are US-made missiles, and only a handful of countries, including the US, use them. A few days ago, President Trump suggested that Tomahawks are, generic and may have come from Iran. That's not possible. Several munitions experts we talked to have said the US is the only actor in this war using Tomahawk missiles.

What does it mean that last year sometime, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegset, made a cut, major cuts, to an office that was in charge of what they call civilian harm mitigation, trying to avoid civilian casualties.

Yeah. I mean, Steve, as you know, there have unfortunately been many other civilian casualty incidents in previous wars and administrations, and those are hopefully mistakes that the US can learn from. A few years ago, Congress mandated an office in the Pentagon to do just that. But shortly after Hegset took office, he cut it by about 90%. He also fired a lot of military lawyers. Here's what Ona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, told me.

At every level, civilian protection has been deprioritized.

But a modern army has to fight according to the law, and the law requires that you protect civilians.

That same US official who told us about the preliminary assessment also told NPR that now all of US Central Command has only one staffer assigned to civilian casualty mitigation operations. We reached out to the Pentagon about this but didn't get a response. I want to be clear, Steve, we can't say that this strike was a direct result of these cuts. Civilians are, unfortunately, always the worst and most affected in modern war.

Yeah, and in recent wars, US military officials felt that mitigating civilian casualties was an important part of the war because there's an information war, a war for hearts and minds. You don't want to lose people's support. Nprs Kat Lonsdorff, thanks so much.

Thank you.

That's Up First for this Thursday, March 12th. I'm Steve Inskeep.

I'm Leila Fadel. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Andrew Sussmann, Rebecca Metzler, James Hyder, Mohamed Al-Bredisi, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Ziyad Batch and Mia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Nisha Hynes. Our technical director is Carly Strange. Our Deputy Executive Producer is Kelly Dickens. Join us again tomorrow.