US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Washington had carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug- carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela.

Trump said that the US military killed 11 people in the strike.

"The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action," Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Initially on Tuesday Trump gave few details on the operation.

"When you leave the room, you'll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat," Trump told reporters, before adding there were "a lot of drugs" on board.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the US fired a "lethal strike" against what was claimed to be a ship loaded with drugs that had departed from Venezuela.

The vessel "was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization," Rubio claimed.

How are relations between the US and Venezuela?

Recently, tensions between the United States and Venezuela have escalated.

The United States accuses Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of heading a drug cartel. Washington has deployed warships to the southern Caribbean in what it has billed as a bid to combat trafficking, while the Venezuelan leader has cast the deployment as a threat to the country.

The latest United Nations World Drug Report illustrated that various countries in South America, including Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, reported larger cocaine seizures in 2022 than in 2021. However, the report does not assign Venezuela the outsize role that the White House has in recent months.

"The impact of increased cocaine trafficking has been felt in Ecuador in particular, which has seen a wave of lethal violence in recent years linked to both local and transnational crime groups, most notably from Mexico and the Balkan countries," according to the UN report.

Edited by: Wesley Dockery