The threat of Iran attempting to blockade the highly strategic Strait of Hormuz has re-emerged amid the conflict that has now erupted between it and Israel. Over the years, the Iranians have amassed an arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles, and kamikaze drones, as well as a slew of maritime capabilities like naval mines, well-suited to the task of shutting down the narrow waterway that links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. At the same time, there are questions about the extent to which Israeli strikes may have hampered Iran’s ability to follow through on such a threat, or even whether the regime in Tehran would want to take such a drastic step that would have global ramifications.
Readers can first get up to speed on the state of the current Israel-Iran conflict, which increasingly includes the targeting of energy infrastructure, in our reporting here.
Esmail Kosari (also sometimes written Esmaeil Kousari or Esmaeil Kowsari), currently a member of Iran’s parliament and head of the parliamentary committee on defense and national security, has said that closing the Strait of Hormuz is now under serious consideration, according to multiple reports today. The original source of the remarks from Kosari, who also holds the rank of brigadier general in Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), appears to be a story from the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran News Network(IRINN).
“The Strait of Hormuz remains open and commercial traffic continues to flow uninterrupted,” according to an advisory notice yesterday from the Joint Maritime Information Center of the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) office. “Currently, the JMIC has no indications of an increased threat to the Maritime.”
This followed earlier advisories from the UKMTO JMIC regarding tensions in the region after Israel began launching strikes on Iran Thursday.
“At the time of this writing, no impact to shipping has been reported” in the region, Ambrey, an international maritime security firm, said in a separate Threat Circular put out after Israel began its latest campaign against Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz “remains open and there are no indications of an increased threat to the Maritime Environment,” Nils Haupt, a spokesman for the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company, told TWZ directly. “At the moment, we do not see an urge to divert any vessels. But of course: we continue to monitor the situation on an hourly basis.”
Haupt also noted his company currently has no ships in either Iranian or Israeli waters.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is just around 20 nautical miles across at its narrowest point, in times of heightened tensions in the past. How narrow the waterway is means that a significant portion of it falls within Iran’s national waters, which also overlap with those of Oman to the south. Normal maritime traffic flows in and out through a pair of established two-mile-wide shipping lanes. Roughly a fifth of all global oil shipments, and an even higher percentage of seaborne shipments, pass through the Strait each year. It is also an important route for the movement of liquid natural gas. Some 3,000 ships use it to get to and from the Persian Gulf each month.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz would have immediate and potentially dramatic impacts on the global price of oil, which, in turn, could cause significant worldwide economic disruptions. Oil prices had already jumped after Israel launched its new campaign against Iran, which has now expanded to include Iranian energy targets.
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