Senior Iranian defence official says country's military remains intact despite US claims, Al Jazeera reports

Rhetorical exchanges of this kind between Washington and Tehran have recurred across past episodes of escalation, and on their own they have tended to move crude, gold and Gulf risk premia only where they change the perceived probability of kinetic action rather than merely restating positions. A denial of damage from a senior defence official is the standard second act in these sequences: claims of success from one side, intact-capability assertions from the other, with the factual gap typically resolved only by subsequent imagery, shipping behaviour or further strikes. The distinction worth drawing is between signalling aimed at deterrence and signalling aimed at domestic audiences; the latter historically carries less market weight, and single-source attribution through regional media adds to that discount. What has mattered in comparable episodes is the follow-on chain: any actual disruption to Gulf shipping lanes, insurance and freight pricing on the strait routes, proxy activity, and whether either side's posture shifts from statements to deployments. Absent those tells, headline-driven moves in this pattern have tended to fade as the rhetoric normalises.