The US military completed its 11th straight night of strikes on Iran on July 22, 2026, hitting aircraft hangars and drone storage sites. President Donald Trump warned that the campaign would intensify and pledged to "soon" target the area near Pickaxe Mountain "very heavily." Pickaxe Mountain is an underground site near one of Iran's main nuclear facilities — places where Iran processes uranium, a material that can be used for either nuclear energy or nuclear weapons. Iran's military leaders have said that striking it would be a major escalation.

Trump first publicly mentioned Pickaxe Mountain on July 13, telling reporters the US would "take out" the site and continue hitting Iran hard, according to Reuters. He sharpened that warning on July 21, saying, "We'll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily," as reported by ABC News. CNN shared the remark on its official Facebook and Instagram accounts on July 22. The exact way Trump delivered the July 21 threat has not been specified in the available reporting.

Pickaxe Mountain is an Iranian nuclear-linked site currently under construction, according to ABC News. Al Jazeera published an explainer on July 14 examining the site, and Reuters followed with its own explainer on July 15. The site's closeness to one of Iran's main nuclear facilities gives it particular importance in the broader US-Iran war, which is centered on the battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Think of it as a bottleneck: about a fifth of all the oil the world uses every day normally passes through it. Right now, it is blocked. Saudi Arabia has been using a pipeline to the Red Sea to get its oil out instead. But that workaround now faces its own threat. Yemen's Houthis — an armed group aligned with Iran — announced a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, opening a second front in the disruption of Gulf oil flows. With both the Strait of Hormuz blocked and the Houthi blockade in place, Saudi Arabia's ability to export oil depends on a single overland route to the Red Sea.

Oil prices are rising as a result. Brent crude, a widely used global oil price measure, traded at $92.09 a barrel on July 22, up 1.2% and its highest price since June 11. West Texas Intermediate, a US oil price measure, climbed 1.1% to $85.23 the same day. Both reflect the combined risk of two disruptions to Gulf oil supplies happening at the same time.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Southeast Asian foreign ministers that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz would set a dangerous precedent with effects beyond the Middle East. He framed the conflict as a global maritime-security issue, not just a regional one. The appeal to ASEAN — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a group of 10 countries in the region — signals an effort to build broader international support for keeping the Strait open.

The war's financial and human costs continue to rise. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the campaign has cost $37.5 billion so far, up nearly $8 billion from the last public estimate. More than 500 US troops have been wounded, according to a US official cited by the Associated Press. No fatality figure was provided in the available reporting.

On the diplomatic front, Iranian Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni visited Pakistan, which has been acting as a key mediator in the conflict. The visit suggests at least one backchannel — an informal, behind-the-scenes line of communication — remains open, even as the military pace on both sides appears to be speeding up rather than calming down.

In a decision seemingly unrelated to the military campaign, Trump said he would allow direct US airline flights to Lebanon to resume. Those flights had been suspended since the 1985 TWA hijacking. How this fits into the broader US approach in the region, if at all, remains unclear from the available facts.

The broader picture here is one of several pressures building at once. Trump's Pickaxe Mountain threat has been repeated across multiple platforms and dates, which suggests either a deliberate attempt to pressure Tehran or a policy commitment being publicly locked in. Iran's statement that such a strike would be a "major escalation" sets a red line that any actual attack on the site would test. The Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia stretches the conflict's geography from the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea. And the $37.5 billion cost, growing by roughly $8 billion each reporting cycle, puts the war on a spending path that will eventually run into political limits in Washington. Whether the Pakistan-mediated channel produces a real step toward peace before any strike on Pickaxe Mountain is the factor most likely to determine whether this conflict stays at its current level or grows wider.