Iran Tanker Attack Today: Two Tankers, LUCAS Drones Claimed

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has claimed that two oil tankers and a tugboat caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz overnight, and that its electronic warfare units seized control of two American LUCAS one-way attack drones and landed them intact. In a statement carried by Iranian state media early on November 5, the Guards said one tanker struck a mine on an unauthorised passage south of the strait, while a supertanker caught fire leaving the route farther east and set alight a tug that came alongside to fight the blaze. No vessel, flag, owner or position was named, and no maritime authority had reported a matching incident by the morning of November 5. It is the second announcement in two days of ships burning on routes the Guards forbid, and apparently the first time they have claimed to hold a LUCAS rather than to have shot one down.

The Guards accused Washington of encouraging shipping onto mined routes, but said nothing of where the drones came down beyond stating that they had been guided to a safe landing. LUCAS, the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System built by Arizona’s SpektreWorks, is in effect an American copy of the Shahed-136, which U.S. Central Command has costed at about $35,000 a drone. The Guards’ Hormozgan command said on November 3 that its air defences had shot down two of the drones over Bandar Khamir, and on October 29 the Guards’ navy used almost identical wording to claim it had seized the guidance of an MQM-170 reconnaissance drone and landed it intact. None of these losses has been confirmed by the U.S. military, and an intact LUCAS would teach Tehran little about an airframe modelled on its own, with the drone’s guidance, anti-jamming software and data links being of considerably greater interest.

The Guards’ tally of ships lost to mines has repeatedly failed to match what monitoring forces record. U.S. Central Command called an August 31 claim of a supertanker striking two mines disinformation, and the multinational Joint Maritime Information Centre found “no substantiation” on October 18 for a claim that two supertankers had been mined, while the four tankers the Guards said were destroyed on November 4 have yet to be identified. The merchant ships confirmed hit over the past week were struck by projectiles, an aerial object or charges fixed to the hull, among them a tanker hit twice off Limah on November 3 and the Indian vessel MSV Al Jusufi, on which a sailor was killed the previous day. The latest claims follow the U.S. strikes on Qeshm Island on November 2, which American officials described as a response to Iranian surface to air missile fire at U.S. aircraft.

Whatever the truth of individual announcements, the threat of mines has kept traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to three or four ships a day in early November, against about 78 a day before the war began on February 28. U.S. officials estimated Iran’s stock of naval mines at between 5,000 and 8,000 before the conflict, a considerable inventory to set against the U.S. Navy’s four remaining Avenger class minesweepers, all of them based at Sasebo in Japan. The four Avenger class ships that had been stationed in Bahrain were decommissioned in September 2025 and carried out of the Gulf aboard the heavy-lift ship Seaway Hawk on January 21, 2026.