Iran seeks to bar US and Israeli ships in Hormuz deal with Oman

Iran will seek to bar US and Israeli ships from the Strait of Hormuz and require compensation from hostile countries before they are allowed to use it, according to local media reports on a proposed Iran-Oman deal to manage the crucial waterway.
The agreement has become key to expectations for a reopening of Hormuz and a resumption of energy flows that have been throttled since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February.
The text is now under review in Iran’s parliament, the semi-official Fars news agency said. Fars reported other details including a proposed ban on cargo related to Israel, and a fee structure covering services like insurance and environmental costs.
“That’s clearly not going to go down well in Washington,” said Thomas Warrick, a former US
State Department official who is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Instead of both sides making concessions, both sides are increasing demands.”
Separately, Fars said on Thursday Iranian naval forces had struck “hostile targets” at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, citing an unnamed source and without giving additional details. Oil prices climbed and stocks fell on Thursday’s developments.

Both US and Iranian officials have been signalling in recent days that some kind of accord on Hormuz is close.
US President Donald Trump, who stepped back from his most recent threats to resume military attacks on Iran, said on Thursday that negotiations were going “fine” and that he was involved, but declined to say whether a deal had been reached.
“We control it, but they can always shoot something,” Trump said of the vital waterway. “People don’t want to take their billion-dollar boats and accidentally get hit by a mine.”
Still, many previous claims of an imminent deal have proven unfounded, and it is not clear if the Iran-Oman proposals will be enough to get traffic flowing again. On Thursday, a key Iranian negotiator mocked the White House for repeatedly making threats and then climbing down, calling it “theatre diplomacy on loop”.
The US has insisted on free transit through Hormuz, and broadly called for a return to the pre-war status quo. Any temporary routes through the strait will not be subject to approvals, permissions, tolls or charges, a US official said on Thursday in response to reports on the latest proposals.
Tehran says a full reopening would require the lifting of the American maritime blockade.
And Washington has not signalled whether it’s ready to go back to the terms it accepted under the last effort to reopen the strait, a June agreement that broke down within weeks. Those included waiving oil sanctions on Iran and unfreezing some of its frozen financial assets.
Oil prices rose on Thursday, with Brent crude above US$82 a barrel, amid concern that the reported Iran-Oman plan may fall short of a wider resumption of energy flows from the Persian Gulf. Prices are still down significantly since Trump said at the weekend he had called off a major military attack.

Fars, citing an informed source at Iran’s foreign ministry, said the draft agreement with Oman foresees Iranian management over the entry of vessels into Hormuz, with the exit being overseen jointly by both countries.
They envisage transit through a “central corridor”, with traffic via the two other routes that are currently in limited use to cease within a “specified time frame”, the agency reported.
Hormuz shipping, which moved freely before the war, has become the key sticking point in the months-long deadlock between the US and Iran, even as the fighting has eased.
An accord on that point would relieve mounting pressure on the global economy from higher energy costs and potentially open the way to talks on other issues like Iran’s nuclear programme.
Other potential obstacles to a durable peace deal have emerged as the war spread across the region.
Those include clashes between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that controls much of Yemen.
The Yemeni group said it launched a “large-scale” attack against Saudi-aligned troops in the country’s central region on Thursday, claiming to have killed and injured hundreds. There was no immediate comment from Riyadh.
The Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen have observed a ceasefire since 2022, but hostilities have erupted in recent weeks, including in the Red Sea.
The conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon also shows signs of flaring up again. The June truce agreement between the US and Iran required a ceasefire in Lebanon too.

Any new deal on the Strait of Hormuz would have to be approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who has been in hiding since being injured in the initial US-Israeli attacks in February.
It is unclear if he has given his consent yet, and Iranian officials have said that communicating with him takes time.
President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a televised interview on Wednesday that communication with Khamenei is “very difficult at the moment”.
On the US side, after Trump called off what he said was going to be a massive new attack on Iran, The Washington Post reported that a shortage of key missiles and air-defence systems was among the reasons.
According to the newspaper, Trump lashed out at Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting last week, saying he had been misled about weapons stocks.
“The US has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’” Trump said in a social media post on Thursday, denying that the country was running low.
In Hormuz, visible traffic through the strait has been limited. Middle Eastern producers have ferried cargoes out of the Gulf as part of a shuttle programme involving help from the US military and vessels turning off their transponders.
Some, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are managing to bypass the strait by piping a significant amount of their oil to ports outside the Persian Gulf.