The US military on Tuesday said it destroyed multiple Iranian tankers, after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps twice attempted to strike a US navy warship with ballistic missiles.

US Central Command (Centcom) said the warship evaded both attempted attacks and no American personnel were injured.

American forces struck the tankers in the Gulf of Oman and near Iran’s Kharg Island, Centcom said in a statement, adding that American forces “directed the crews to abandon ship before the vessels were struck”.

Centcom said the targeted tankers were “part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the IRGC and its regional proxies”, though the military did not provide further details.

Remarking on the latest strikes, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said the US would not let Iran’s attacks to go unanswered.

“Iran continues to try to hit US naval ships. And for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers. And I think you’ll see that again today,” Rubio said on Tuesday, responding to reporters questions about the attack while on a trip to Colombia.

The strikes followed an earlier dispute over an American underwater drone in the strait of Hormuz, which the IRGC claimed, according to Iranian state TV, its naval forces had seized as part of a “complex intelligence and operational action at dawn”. In a statement provided to Iranian state media, the IRGC said images of the vessel would be released shortly.

However, the US military said the unmanned submarine had “malfunctioned” more than a day earlier.

In a statement, US Navy Capt Tim Hawkins, a United States Central Command spokesperson, said the submersible was “defective” and an older model “that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment”. Operations in area waters continue, he said.

Iran has maintained a blockade of the strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about one fifth of the global oil and gas shipments, since the outbreak of the war more than six months ago, while the US has imposed its own blockade of Iranian ports.

After a month of relative calm in August, Iran and the US have resumed exchanges of fire, sending ‌global oil prices back up to levels last seen in July.

Trump has struggled to end the unpopular war, which has claimed the lives of 18 US service members.

Iranian authorities have previously put the overall death toll from US and Israeli strikes in the thousands, figures that outside observers, including US-based monitoring groups, have broadly corroborated.