US official says US military did not target Kharg Island in overnight strikes, according to reports

Kharg Island handles the overwhelming bulk of Iranian crude exports, which is why any strike headline touching it moves the front of the oil curve and freight and insurance costs before anything is confirmed. Denials of this kind are a familiar sequence in Gulf escalation episodes: initial reports of a strike on energy infrastructure price the worst case, and the official walk-back then unwinds part of the risk premium, though rarely all of it, since the denial itself confirms the target was in play. The distinction that matters is between facilities actually hit and facilities demonstrably spared: spared infrastructure caps the supply story at disruption risk rather than realised loss, which historically shifts the premium back toward shipping rates and war-risk cover rather than outright crude length. The prior form in comparable episodes is that attribution and intent get contested for days, and the tape trades each clarification. The follow-ons are whether the denial is corroborated by other parties, any Iranian response framing, and tanker behaviour and loading schedules out of the Gulf, which tend to be the first hard data point on whether flows were actually interrupted. As a denial rather than an event, this is a volatility story more than a supply story at this stage.