Twelve commodity vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday. The day before, 29 did. The maritime tracking firm Kpler supplied both counts, which followed a vessel strike on Saturday morning.
The record from the previous week looks very different. A memorandum of understanding signed by Tehran and Washington on June 15 lifted traffic to its highest level since the Middle East war began, Kpler said, with 70 crossings on Wednesday. Sunday’s total is a sharp fall from that peak.
The weekend also saw a new exchange of strikes between the United States and Iran, which strained the preliminary deal to end the conflict.
Ships kept moving, for a while
Iran had warned against using unapproved shipping lanes. Vessels used several routes through the strait over the weekend anyway. After Saturday’s strike, ships kept using a southern corridor through Omani waters for several hours before traffic appeared to slow, according to MarineTraffic, which Kpler owns.
One caution on the numbers: MarineTraffic follows only vessels with active transponders, so ships that turned their signals off may have crossed unseen. Kpler said totals could rise as crossings are identified after the fact, notably from satellite imagery.
Direction changed too. More ships entered the Gulf over the weekend than left it. The previous week had been the reverse, as efforts centered on getting stranded seafarers out. A UN-led operation to evacuate 11,000 seafarers was suspended on Thursday after a vessel was struck in the Gulf of Oman.
On Sunday, four tankers and a container ship entered the Gulf through the southern Omani corridor under US Navy escort, according to a post on X by HFI Research. Kpler recorded no vessels using that corridor to leave the Gulf that day.
Talks over who manages the strait
Politics ran alongside the shipping data. Iran said on Monday that it had held its first meeting with Oman to discuss managing the strait. Washington has warned it will not accept transit fees for a waterway it regards as international.
