Strait of Hormuz Remains Effectively Blocked After Naval Skirmishes

Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained throttled on Saturday, after naval skirmishes between U.S. and Iranian forces in recent days heightened tensions in the vital shipping route.

For weeks, the narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea has been choked by two competing blockades enforced by each side in the conflict. About 1,600 ships are bottled up in the Persian Gulf.

Since April 13, the U.S. Navy has intercepted and turned around 58 commercial ships that were either leaving or trying to enter Iranian ports, and American forces have “disabled” four other ships that did not comply with American orders, Central Command announced on Saturday.

In public statements, the United States and Iran continued to trade threats on Saturday. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy said that any attack on Iranian vessels would be met with a “heavy assault” on American ships and other U.S. targets in the region. President Trump posted a meme of Iranian warships that had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Data from MarineTraffic, a global ship-tracking firm, indicates that at least six cargo ships, have crossed the Strait of Hormuz since Wednesday, but no tankers. Tracking by the London Stock Exchange Group shows that the number of ships passing through the narrows each day has decreased since Monday, from an already-low level.

Those intelligence firms may provide an incomplete picture, however, because vessels sometimes fake or shut off their location signals. Still, the data they have collected generally shows how traffic has plunged in recent days, even relative to some other periods during the cease-fire, which started on April 7.

On Thursday, there was a new round of skirmishes in the strait. The United States said it struck military sites in Iran after Iran attacked three American destroyers. On Friday, the U.S. military said that it had fired on two Iranian-flagged oil tankers, disabling them as they tried to reach an Iranian port.

Iran, for its part, said it had attacked the American warships on Thursday in retaliation for what it described as American cease-fire violations, including strikes on the country’s southern coast. Iranian forces kept up their efforts on Friday, seizing a Chinese-owned oil tanker in the strait.

On Saturday, the Mehr news agency, affiliated with the Iran’s security forces, quoted a regional governor who said that an overnight American attack had struck six vessels in the country’s Khasab port, leaving six people missing. There was no American confirmation of that attack.

As tensions rose between the United States and Iran, other countries appeared to be taking steps to address the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, which has driven up energy prices and jolted markets around the world, with dire consequences for the global economy.

Britain on Saturday said the Royal Navy was deploying a destroyer ship to the Middle East in what it described as “pre-positioning” for a future mission to secure the Strait of Hormuz. Britain and France have said they are planning a “multinational coalition” to ensure safe passage for ships in the strait once the conflict ends, though there has been little detail of what that would entail.

One Qatar-owned gas tanker was trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz on the Iranian side on Saturday, en route to Pakistan, according to several vessel-tracking intelligence firms. If the tanker were to make it through, it would be the first Qatari natural gas tanker to do so since the beginning of the war.

It was not clear on Saturday night if the ship had made it through the strait into the Gulf of Oman, though the London Stock Exchange Group said that extrapolating from its last known position and course, it could have done so. QatarEnergy, the state-owned gas company that operates the tanker, has not publicly commented.

In normal times, about 130 vessels passed through the strait each day, carrying, among other things, about a fifth of the world’s oil supply. It is also a crucial passage for ships carrying natural gas, fertilizer and other products.