A senior Iranian official announced Tuesday that Iran and Oman have agreed on a temporary shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz, though Tehran insists the strategic waterway will not fully reopen until Washington honors its commitments under a June interim agreement.
The statement came from Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, following talks in Tehran between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and his Omani counterpart, Badr Albusaidi. The diplomats met to finalize a phased framework for managing transit through the strait.
As coastal states bordering the passage, Iran and Oman have engaged in intermittent negotiations for weeks to regulate traffic through the channel, which previously facilitated roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments before the U.S.-Israel conflict with Tehran erupted in February. Commercial shipping through the strait has been largely halted since the onset of hostilities.
Speaking on state television, Gharibabadi detailed that the new corridor’s entry point lies within Iranian territorial waters, with a portion of the exit route also traversing them. The transit lane spans seven miles (11.3 kilometers) in width.
“The agreed-upon transit route with Oman is a temporary route,” Gharibabadi emphasized.
According to a joint statement released after Tuesday’s meeting, the ministers discussed the temporary navigation corridor alongside a project to clear mines from the strait. Albusaidi posted on X expressing hope that the corridor would be formally announced soon, noting that long-term management and a permanent solution would follow in due course. Technical talks are slated to develop a lasting arrangement, including mechanisms for information sharing and navigational and security services.
Mines in Hormuz
The Strait of Hormuz became a flashpoint after Tehran responded to the U.S.-Israel war by closing the waterway. Iran subsequently declared a new shipping route through its territorial waters, bypassing the internationally recognized Traffic Separation Scheme adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 1968, and asserted that the original route had been mined.
In June, following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Iran and the U.S. to end the conflict, Oman and the IMO announced a new transit corridor hugging the Omani coast—a route backed by Washington. Iran rejected the southern corridor as a violation of the MoU and subsequently attacked vessels using it, leading to the collapse of the interim deal.
Diplomatic efforts toward a broader peace agreement have since stalled, and passage through the strait remains perilous. On Tuesday, the United Kingdom’s maritime trade operations reported that an oil tanker was disabled by an unidentified projectile near Oman’s Ash Shishah, close to the strait’s entrance.
Despite the agreement with Oman, Gharibabadi stated Iran would not consider the strait open. He also dismissed a claim by U.S. President Donald Trump that all mines had been cleared from international waters, characterizing the assertion as an attempt to calm markets. He warned that U.S. mine-detection vessels would become “very good targets” if they entered the area.
Gharibabadi insisted the U.S. must fulfill its MoU obligations—including sanctions relief and the release of frozen Iranian assets—to revive the diplomatic track. He further urged nations to resist U.S. pressure regarding sanctions on Iran.
Trump announced last week the “most crushing economic operation ever” against Iran and threatened sanctions against any country conducting business with Tehran.
“We are urging countries not to succumb to American pressure regarding the sanctions that Washington wants to impose on us,” Gharibabadi said, adding that Washington was “mistaken about its ability to enforce its sanctions against our neighbours.”
He argued that a previous U.S. sanctions campaign under Trump had failed to achieve its objectives and predicted the new measures would meet the same fate. “The new American sanctions are doomed to failure, and we have our own methods to counter them,” he added.
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