Iran is conducting ‘indiscriminate’ targeting of vessels across the Gulf of Oman and the wider Persian Gulf following the launch of U.S.-Israeli strikes under Operation Epic Fury, according to a maritime intelligence firm.

Windward AI noted the sanctioned Palau-flagged tanker Skylight was hit as the conflict across the Middle East entered its second day, with the tanker also holding Iranian nationals among the crew and ties to the regime.

‘Analysis of vessel affiliations, targeting patterns, and cargo data points to a strategy of indiscriminate area denial — not precision targeting — aimed at demonstrating Iran’s capability to disrupt the Strait and deter commercial shipping,’ the firm said Monday.

Iran has been retaliating with missiles and drones targeting U.S. and allied positions across the region, including in Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which links the Gulf of Oman to the Persian Gulf, is the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.

While three other vessels were reported attacked since the hostilities escalated Feb. 28, Windward described Skylight as ‘the highest-risk vessel in the group and the most anomalous target.’

The UKMTO Operation Centre also later confirmed attacks on Skylight, MKD Vyom and Hercules Star, warning of significant military activity across the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, the North Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

Skylight had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in December 2025, and was used to transport Iranian petroleum products, according to reports.

It was operated by United Arab Emirates-based Red Sea Ship Management LLC, which Windward noted has documented ties to front companies linked to Iran’s Ministry of Defense.

The vessel had been at anchor since Feb. 22 and carried 20 crew members — 15 Indians and five Iranians.

‘The Skylight anomaly — striking a vessel with an Iranian crew, Iranian operational ties, and active OFAC sanctions — is the single strongest piece of evidence against deliberate targeting by affiliation,’ Windward said.

Reuters also reported March 1 that the Palau-flagged tanker was hit off Oman’s Musandam Peninsula in the Gulf of Oman, injuring four.

Oman’s Maritime Security Center said in a post on X that Skylight was attacked about 5 nautical miles north of Khasab Port, caught fire and was evacuated.

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Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., described the recent U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran as a defensive measure, saying, ‘Israel was determined to act with or without us’ following a classified briefing on Monday evening.

Johnson told reporters after the briefing that Israel viewed Iran’s capabilities as an existential threat and was prepared to conduct operations regardless of U.S. participation. He said Israel’s assessment shaped American deliberations, and it was ‘determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support.’

The speaker said administration officials had to weigh risks to U.S. forces, regional assets and interests before supporting the operation. 

‘They had to evaluate the threats to the U.S., to our troops, to our installations, to our assets in the region and beyond. And they determined, because of the intelligence that we had, that a coordinated response was necessary,’ Johnson said.

Johnson said he guarantees that if the U.S. had not acted, the Trump administration would have been hauled in by Congress and asked why they waited if they had ‘existential intelligence, knowing that that would happen.’

‘I am convinced that they did the right thing,’ he said.

Rubio confirmed that Israel was prepared to act against Iran and said the president ‘made a very wise decision.’  

‘We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces,’ he told reporters. ‘And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.’

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., a top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, emerged from the briefing and said he did not believe there was an ‘imminent threat’ prior to Saturday’s strikes. 

‘There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. It was a threat to Israel,’ he said. ‘We equate a threat to Israel is the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States. Then we are in uncharted territory.’ 

‘We have seen the goals for this operation change now, I believe 4 or 5 times,’ he went on.

Rubio insisted the operation was not about Iranian regime change but about taking out its capabilities as a threat to the region – focused on ballistic missiles and naval capacity. 

He did not say whether strikes would extend to nuclear facilities.

‘I do believe there is more than adequate justification for our American and Israeli actions,’ Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told reporters he believes there is ‘more than adequate justification for our American and Israeli actions,’ without saying more.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital in an interview afterward that he felt administration officials did a good job of illustrating the threat level faced by the U.S. in the days leading up to the strikes.

‘I think that’s largely been very open source. The president laid that out, you know, very clearly. It does go beyond that to what I can’t get into, but it goes beyond that. I’m sure it’ll come out in the administration’s good time, but it’s not for me to say,’ Mast said.

‘But the more immediate nature of threats — I’m going through the negotiations with [Special Envoy Steve Witkoff], [Jared Kushner], Rubio, others that were a part of having those conversations and throughout that 10-day window of, you know, let’s call it countdown to make a deal, the threats that were going on in that window is probably the high-side information that you have.’

He also said there was a lot of daylight between what Democrats and Republicans in the briefing considered an ‘imminent threat.’

‘It’s like, for me as a soldier, right, if I see an enemy machine gun nest, that to me, given that it’s an enemy machine gun nest, is an imminent threat,’ Mast said. ‘To Democrats, unless that machine gun is burning up its barrels firing at you, it’s not yet an imminent threat. And those are the two separate ways that we’re looking at it.’.

On February 26th, the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran in coordination with Israel. The offensive campaign has resulted in the death of 49 top Iranian leaders, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Six U.S. service members have lost their lives in Iranian counterattacks. 

The opening phase of the conflict struck more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours, according to Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. American B-2 bombers flew 37-hour round-trip missions from the continental United States to hit underground facilities with penetrating munitions, he added.

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X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has begun rolling out its first beta version of Grok 4.20, which Elon Musk and X say will provide not only better performance and new features but also the least ‘politically correct’ platform in terms of liberal bias. 

Over the past week, users on X, including Musk, have been touting search results from Grok showing ‘non woke’ answers to questions about popular cultural issues and figures compared to results from Anthropic’s Claude, Open AI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini. 

‘Grok 4.20 is BASED,’ Musk also posted on X last week. ‘The only AI that doesn’t equivocate when asked if America is on stolen land. The others are weak sauce.’

Musk’s post included screenshots of ChatGPT saying the ‘short answer’ is ‘yes’, Claude ultimately saying ‘yes’ and Gemini saying the answer is ‘complex’ while Grok responds with ‘No.’

In another post shared by Musk, the AI platforms are asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if President Donald Trump is ‘racist.’

Grok responded with ‘No’ while Gemini responded by saying the answer is not as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Claude and ChatGPT also declined to respond with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’: arguing it’s a more nuanced issue. 

‘Grok 4.20 is the only non-woke AI in existence, engineered to pursue maximum truth, and deliver unfiltered, evidence-based answers where every other major model has been lobotomized by the woke mind virus,’ an xAI spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

The recent attack on Iran by the United States and Israel also provided examples on social media of Grok results appearing less ‘biased’ than other platforms, including a post showing what happened when each platform was asked a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question about whether Trump was ‘right’ to authorize the strike. 

Grok responded with ‘yes’ while ChatGPT said ‘no’ and both Gemini and Claude argued that the situation was too nuanced to respond definitively one way or the other. 

‘In times of split second decision making by our nation’s top leaders — it’s clear which AI our military should be using,’ ‘The Katie Miller Show’ host and former DOGE adviser Katie Miller posted on X. ‘Truth-seeking is @grok’s best feature.’

Various websites have attempted to track the political leanings of artificial intelligence platforms, including Dartmouth College’s Polarization Research Lab, last updated in 2025, which ranked Gemini as the least political. In early 2025, a Manhattan Institute report concluded Grok was a close second to Gemini in terms of political bias. 

An OpenAI spokesperson pointed Fox News Digital to its public ModelSpec which defines how ChatGPT should behave and ‘assume an objective point of view’ and said ‘we actively test and measure political bias in ways that mirror real-world use and publish our findings, including evaluations across hundreds of prompts and real production traffic, where detectable political bias is rare (fewer than 0.01% of responses show any detectable political bias) and continues to decline with newer models.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Anthropic and Google for comment.

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned that some traditional U.S. allies are ‘hemming and hawing about the use of force’ as Washington presses forward with its campaign against Iran, raising fresh questions about NATO cohesion at a moment of escalation.

Spain has refused U.S. permission to use certain bases for strikes on Iran, calling for de-escalation and adherence to international law. Turkey has criticized the operation and warned of broader regional destabilization, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he was ‘saddened’ by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death and denied that Turkish territory was used in the campaign. 

In a statement released on Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that, ‘The outbreak of war between the United States, Israel and Iran carries grave consequences for international peace and security.’ He added, ‘The ongoing escalation is dangerous for all. It must stop.’

During Monday’s media briefing, Hegseth drew a sharp contrast between Israel and what he described as hesitant allies. ‘Israel has clear missions as well, for which we are grateful. Capable partners, as we’ve said since the beginning. Capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies, who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.’

The criticism reflects growing frustration inside the administration that while some European capitals have issued statements of support, operational backing has not matched the rhetoric.

President Donald Trump also voiced dissatisfaction with allied hesitation. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Trump said he was ‘very disappointed’ in British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for initially blocking U.S. use of British bases and that Starmer took ‘far too much time’ to reverse course.

The United Kingdom later authorized U.S. use of key facilities, including Diego Garcia, after raising initial legal objections and following a drone strike on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.

Justin Fulcher, former senior adviser to Hegseth, told Fox News Digital the moment represents ‘an absolutely critical inflection point where NATO should act in a unified way in support of what the United States is doing.’

He framed the issue as larger than the current campaign. ‘Symbolically, the U.S.-NATO alliance is critical when looking at actually restoring deterrence globally,’ Fulcher said, arguing that visible unity would send a message not only to Tehran but to other geopolitical rivals watching how the alliance responds under pressure.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has sought to downplay suggestions of division.

‘I spoke with all the key European leaders over the weekend,’ Rutte said on Fox News. ‘There is widespread support for what the president is doing.’

He added, ‘Europe is stepping up, is doing what is necessary to make sure this operation can go ahead and deliver all the enablement necessary.’

Germany has struck a more cautious tone. Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned in Sunday that strikes risk an Iraq- or Afghanistan-style quagmire and that Europe would bear the consequences.

At the same time, he said Berlin would not ‘lecture’ the U.S. ‘We recognize the dilemma,’ he said, explaining that repeated attempts over past decades had not put Iran off trying to acquire nuclear weapons or oppressing its own people. ‘So we’re not going to be lecturing our partners on their military strikes against Iran.’

‘Despite all the doubts, we share many of their aims,’ he said.

Fulcher contrasted the current hesitation with the strong reactions from some NATO capitals during past alliance disputes, including tensions surrounding Greenland.

‘When you look at Greenland, that was obviously a very touchy subject for some countries in the Alliance,’ Fulcher said. ‘Iran for decades has been a huge promoter and funder of terrorism all across the globe — attacks that have happened in Europe, in many NATO and European countries,’ he said. ‘For me, it is quite shocking that we’re seeing a difficult time for many NATO members to fully unify and step up in support of the United States and what the U.S. and Israel is doing in Iran.’

He argued that Europe has a significant strategic incentive to see Iranian capabilities degraded.

‘I think actually Europe and NATO have the most to gain from neutralizing the threat that emanates from Iran,’ Fulcher said. ‘When you look at whether the ballistic missile threat or some of the state-sponsored terrorism threats, Europe has been on the receiving end of much more of these threats than the United States has in some cases.’

He stressed that support should extend beyond public endorsements.

‘Some of our European allies can do a lot more to not just support with words, which should be the bare minimum here, but also support with actual tangible action,’ Fulcher concluded.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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