Fighting persists in Middle East

The escalating conflict involving Israel, the United States and Iran continued to ratchet up tensions on Friday as it was about to enter its third week. The death toll has surpassed 2,000 people across the region amid growing global concerns about a possible energy crisis.

The Red Cross Society of China will provide the Iranian Red Crescent Society with $200,000 in emergency humanitarian assistance as special funds to offer condolences and support to the parents of students killed in an attack on a girls' primary school in southern Iran.

"We express our deep condolences over the deaths of the students killed at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Iran's Hormozgan Province and extend our sincere sympathies to their families," Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Friday, announcing the aid.

"Attacking schools and harming children constitutes a serious violation of international humanitarian law and gravely offends the moral conscience of humanity."

According to media reports, an ongoing military investigation has preliminarily determined that a US missile hit an Iranian primary school. The Iranian Red Crescent Society said 175 people, including children, were killed in the strike.

Iran's navy said on Friday that it had earlier launched a coastal anti-ship missile at the US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln roughly 340 kilometers off Iran's maritime borders in the Sea of Oman. Iran's state TV reported that in the wake of the strike, the US vessel and its accompanying strike group were seen "fleeing the area at high speed".

But the claim was quickly dismissed by US officials, who said there was no evidence the warship had been targeted or struck. The US has deployed two aircraft carriers — the other being the USS Gerald R. Ford — to the Middle East.

US President Donald Trump said oil tankers should "show some guts" and sail through the Strait of Hormuz, even as Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Thursday that the US military was currently "not ready" to escort commercial tankers through the vital waterway.

Oil prices have hovered around the $100 per barrel mark even though the International Energy Agency has agreed to coordinate the release of a record 400 million barrels from petroleum reserves worldwide, marking the largest such release in the agency's history.

Analysts said that the growing gridlock of roughly 1,000 ships trapped in the Persian Gulf amounts to a shipping logjam that threatens to eclipse the scale of the "tanker war crisis" of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.

Energy crisis looms

Traders are bracing for weeks, if not months, of turmoil in energy markets amid scant signs of an imminent diplomatic breakthrough, said retired Royal Navy officer Tom Sharpe. While 150 ships typically transit the Strait of Hormuz daily to maintain normal energy supplies, only a trickle of vessels is navigating the route at present.

"There was a much higher tolerance to run the gauntlet back then but the threat was less and the Iranians had nothing like the (missile and drone) arsenal they have now, which is more like the tanker wars on steroids," Sharpe said.

Heavy exchanges of drones and missiles rippled across the region on Friday. To date, more than 600 people have been killed in Lebanon, over 1,300 in Iran, and a dozen in Israel. At least seven US service members have lost their lives in the fighting. Saudi Arabia's Defense Ministry said on Friday that its forces had intercepted more than 50 drones, including one targeting the Diplomatic Quarter in its capital.

In the UAE, debris fell on the facade of a building in central Dubai on Friday morning. The Dubai Media Office said no injuries were reported after what it described as a "minor incident". Since the Iranian attacks on the Emirates began, the country has "engaged" 278 ballistic missiles, 15 cruise missiles and 1,540 drones.

In Iraq, a US military refueling plane crashed on Thursday, though the US military said it was "not due to hostile fire or friendly fire". However, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed armed factions, said it downed the aircraft with a missile, killing all crew members on board.

In another sign of the war's spread, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the death of the country's first soldier in Iraq's Erbil region.

Contact the writers at cuihaipei@chinadaily.com.cn.