Iran Says the Strait of Hormuz Stays Shut Until Washington 'Corrects Its Behavior'
Tehran's security chief laid out six conditions for reopening the world's most important oil chokepoint. Fewer than 10 ships a day are getting through a waterway that used to carry 130.
Iran will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the United States "corrects its behavior," the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council said Sunday, attaching a list of six conditions to a waterway that normally carries a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and is now moving almost nothing.
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr said Tehran wants a permanent end to the war, the lifting of the naval blockade, a withdrawal of American forces from the region, the removal of sanctions, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and compensation for war damage. Only then, he said, would the strait return to normal traffic. It is the most explicit price Iran has publicly put on the chokepoint since the ceasefire collapsed on July 14, and it goes well beyond anything under discussion in the talks Oman has been hosting.
The numbers behind the standoff are stark. Fewer than 10 vessels a day have been transiting the strait in recent days, against roughly 130 before the war resumed on February 28. Fifty-three ships had been redirected away from Iranian ports as of Saturday. Fifteen vessels belonging to Abu Dhabi National Oil Company have been attacked since the fighting began. For a passage that sits at its narrowest just 21 miles across, with shipping lanes only two miles wide in each direction, that level of disruption is not a blockade in name only.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi tried to cool expectations that a deal was imminent, even as he acknowledged the Omani channel was working. Talks with Oman were "approaching the final stages," he said, but added a warning that undercut the optimism: "this is not a sign of the reopening of the Strait." Araghchi has repeatedly said direct negotiations with Washington cannot restart while what Iran describes as violations continue.
The Revolutionary Guards were blunter. "Our current strategy is to maintain this strait until the enemy accepts all our conditions," spokesman Hossein Mohebi said. Mohsen Rezaei, newly installed at the head of the Supreme National Security Council, said Iran would never allow unauthorized passage through the waterway — language that treats transit as something Tehran grants rather than something international law guarantees.
President Trump has offered a considerably sunnier reading, telling reporters the strait is "sort of open right now." The traffic data does not support that. The gap between the White House's description and what tanker trackers are recording has become its own point of friction with Gulf governments, which are absorbing the cost of rerouted cargoes, higher insurance premiums and idled export capacity while Washington plays down the disruption.
The strait's closure has already reshaped global energy routing. Saudi Arabia has leaned on its east-west pipeline to the Red Sea, and the UAE on the Fujairah line that bypasses Hormuz entirely, but between them those pipelines carry only a fraction of what the strait moves. Qatar, whose liquefied natural gas has no pipeline alternative at all, has been effectively cut off from its Asian customers.
What makes Zolghadr's list difficult is that several items on it are things the United States has spent the last five months refusing. Compensation for war damage and the unfreezing of assets are not procedural steps that can be conceded quietly in Muscat; they are the kind of terms that require a political decision in Washington. Until one is made, the arithmetic at Hormuz stays where it is: 10 ships where there used to be 130.
Originally reported by CBS News.