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Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service, coming to you live from London.

I'm James Kamara Sami.

The clock, it seems, is ticking.

President Trump has given the Iranians 48 hours to make a deal to

reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else, in his words, all hell will drain down on them.

Unmentioned in that social media post was another race against time inside Iran.

The search for a missing U.S. airman who was on board an F-15 fighter jet shot down

apparently over the

southwest of the country on Friday. According to US officials, the pilot of that plane was

rescued, as was the pilot of another jet that crashed near the Strait of Hormuz. A Black Hawk

helicopter involved in the rescue mission was reportedly hit by fire, but managed to escape.

All of this, as the attacks on Iran's infrastructure have continued, Israel said today

it has struck petrochemical factories. Several deaths have been reported in Iran, while Iranian

media have said one person died in an airstrike on the nuclear power plant at Bashir.

For its part, Iran has continued to fire both physical and rhetorical weapons,

targeting Israel, Iraq and the Gulf countries with missiles and drones,

while threatening in familiar-sounding terms,

to create a regional hellscape for the US and Israel if they escalate their actions.

Or later in the program, we'll consider what all of this might portend,

but let's begin with the fate of the missing US airmen.

The BBC's Joe Inwood has been looking at how the incident has been reported inside Iran.

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