US/Israel conduct airstrikes on Iran again

Okay. So you really want to play this game?

Let's start with the Iranian ports east of the Strait of Hormuz. I just checked out the entire coastline and there are exactly two ports of any appreciable physical size that are present there.

The first one is east of Bandar-e-Jask, near the village of Hodjan. You can see it to the right of that Google Maps screenshot below.

While it looks pretty impressive from this scale, this changes once you zoom in:

The port was very much still under construction when this satellite image was taken in April 2024. We can see land reclamation taking place inside the breakwaters, and what looks like some dredgers present in the port as well. Whilst the port is likely to have been completed since then, the landward side of the port is equally barren. It looks like there's some sort of industrial park being built, but the roads don't look like they can support a particularly high volume of traffic. More importantly, there's no indication anywhere that any sort of oil handling infrastructure is being built here, making this port unusable for Iran's primary export.

Moving on further east, there are no locations that are really suitable for a major port until we get to Chabahar Bay.

That is a nice deepwater bay ideally suited for a port. And indeed, when we zoom in, we can see that the port of Chabahar itself is substantial, or, at least more substantial than the one at Hodjan.

We an see that it has several berths for container ships, a facility for bulk cargo and the accompanying storage silos, likely used for grain, at the southern end of the basin, and we an see that, as of March 2025, when this image was taken, reclamation work was ongoing to extend the port. However, once again, there is no evidence of any crude oil handling facilities, making this port useless for Iran's primary cash export. Furthermore, this port is just about as far east as you can get in Iran, a mere 100 kilometres away from the border with Pakistan.

Furthermore, we need to talk about capacity. And for that, let's take a look at Iran's primary ports, Bandar Abbas, Rajaei, Kharg Island and Bandar Khomeini. I'm leaving out the river port at Abadan on the Shatt-al-Arab in order to concentrate on classic deep water ports.

Starting off with Bandar Abbas, we can already see that, whilst the port is older and seems designed to mostly handle smaller ships, it is already larger than Chabahar port, with significant shoreside infrastructure. It's also worth pointing out that the basin on the right houses a major base for the Iranian navy.

Just a little further up the coast, sheltered behind the island of Queshm, is the port of Rajei. This port alone is bigger than Bandar Abbas, Hojdan, and Chabahar combined. It has significant container and bulk cargo handling facilities, an oil pier behind the eastern breakwater on the lower right hand corner of the image, as well as significant shoreside road and rail infrastructure.

As we move further up the gulf, we get to Kharg Island, Iran's primary crude oil terminal. There are multiple large oil piers for tankers, both built out from the island (right hand side) and off-shore (left side), each able to handle multiple supertankers at the same time. There are also large oil depots on the island, as well as all the pumping infrastructure needed to get oil from the mainland out to Kharg. The white dots on the extreme left side of the image are single point moorings (SPM) that enable the loading and/or unloading of tankers even when there's no pier side berth available. Just as a interesting aside, the Whiddy Island oil depot in Bantry Bay here in Ireland makes use of an SPM as well.

Finally, we get to Bandar Khomeini, a port on the western edge of of the Persian Gulf, close to the border with Iraq. Once again, this is a substantial facility, larger than all Iranian ports east of Hormuz combined. There are large bulk cargo facilities on the western side of the port, likely ore or coal, container handling facilities, rail yards, and a number of oil/petrochemical piers on the western side of the island, combined with tank farms and what looks like a refinery.

The contrast between these port facilities speaks for itself. There is no way in hell that Iran would ever be able to compensate for the complete loss of its ports on the Gulf and in the Strait of Hormuz by simply moving shipping east. The infrastructure isn't there, regardless of whether you're talking about the ports themselves or the shoreside infrastructure, i.E. roads, rail lines and rail yards, pipelines, etc.

Finally, let's talk Wexford. As if we hadn't had enough horror in this thread already…

When you're talking about the Irish Sea being mined between Wexford and Wales, you're probably basing it of this map:

And on the surface, it would seem that you're right, except that the mined area actually stretched down to Cornwall, rather than Wales. However, this is not an accurate representation of what actually happened. This map shows the general areas where mines were place, but it doesn't show the actual minefields themselves. Indeed, another map from about the same time shows a completely different picture.

Here, the mined area basically only covers the entrance to the Bristol Channel, the approaches to the Irish coast, as well as the entrance to the Irish Sea, are wide open. Equally, the minefields of Britain's east coast, which were marked as completely solid in the previous map, show significant gaps here. This makes sense of course, there are important ports on the East Coast that need to be kept open, fishing fleets still need to be able to go about their jobs, even if only to a limited degree, and there's the small matter of naval bases at Chatham, Harwich and Rosyth that need to remain accessible as well.

Finally, let's go on a literal deep dive into this.

This map shows German U-Boat losses in the British Isles between August 1944 and Germany's surrender in 1945. We can see here that the minefield once again stretches all the way to the edge of Irish territorial waters. Incidentally, there's also what looks like a minefield of Cape Clear. Wouldn't be the first time I've heard West Cork described as a minefield, but I digress. The important thing here is what the minefield is described as, namely a deep laid minefield. Those are minefields where the mines are positioned to let surface ships through, but make an area impassable for submarines.

It's also worth remembering that even if minefields are present, they are not permanent. Passages through them are regularly cleared, both by the enemy and by the nation that laid them. Going back to World War 1 for a second, in the aftermath of the Battle of Jutland in 1916, German Admiral Reinhard Scheer had to retreat to port with the remnants of Germany's High Seas Fleet. From his position off of the Jutland peninsula, he opted to head past Horn's Reef, a shallow area about 15 kilometres off of the Danish coast. Thing is, Germany had mined pretty much all of the area between the Dogger Bank and the German North Sea coast, so he had to radio ahead for German minesweepers to clear a path for them through their own minefields.

So your assertion that the southern entrance to the Irish Sea was blocked off is quite simply wrong. It was mined, true. But those minefields were not solid, they were not uniform, and they were not permanent. Only a fool would permanently close off any body of water to all traffic, including their own. And as I've said before, the Iranians aren't fools. They have business to do, hard cash to bring in, and they are not about to commit economic suicide by cutting off their own lifeline.

I just read that USA still haven't admitted the school bombing. Everyone knows!

I thought the US generals would be a bit more forthright. It's extremely bad optics.

Fascinating stuff thomil. Is that your area of work?

I wish! This type of analysis has always appealed to me, but as a school dropout, I can’t really see a way into that kind of work. So it’s basically a hobby for me, based on my love of history, naval history and aviation, amongst other things. Growing up a nuke’s throw away from the inner-German border in the 1980s surrounded by all kinds of history books probably had a part to play as well…

Please answer the two questions in my post. Repeated below.

"I know you don't like questions but are you suggesting that annexing the West Bank and Gaza (which the UN map shows) does not constitute a plan for a greater Israel? Do you deny that Israel wants to expand it's borders?"

I am surprised you cannot recall this controversy. Contested lands indeed.

Nah I think it was closed years ago