An Iranian cargo ship is struck off Qeshm hours before the Hormuz talks

A merchant ship was hit at about 05:00 Iran time on Sunday off Hengam and Qeshm islands, Qeshm city governor Amir Teymouri told state television. One crew member died. Three others were wounded, he said. The Associated Press, citing IRNA, later put the wounded at four and said the dead sailor was one of ten people on board.

Teymouri blamed a "terrorist enemy" and said authorities had not identified the projectile. State media reported several explosions overnight around Qeshm, the largest island in the Strait of Hormuz and a base for Iran's effort to police traffic through the waterway. Qeshm sits about 22 kilometres from Bandar Abbas.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre separately reported a vessel struck by a projectile while transiting the strait. A later UKMTO note said a fire had broken out and that local authorities were taking people off the ship. The two reports have not been formally matched to a single named hull.

The timing is the point. Foreign ministers from Iran and Gulf states are due in Oman on Monday to talk about how ships move through a strait that, until February, carried about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. Bahrain has already said it will stay away until ties with Tehran are restored. A senior Iranian official told Reuters this weekend that a fee on transit remains Iran's aim and that Oman rejects it.

Iran closed the waterway after the United States and Israel opened their war on 28 February. Tehran now requires ships to obtain permission to pass and has spoken of a service charge. Vessels that ignore the new rules have been hit. The United States has answered with strikes on the Iranian coast and on tankers Washington links to the Revolutionary Guards.

Hours before Sunday's attack, President Masoud Pezeshkian posted that Iran would not surrender. The message was aimed at Washington. It did not name a ship.

Casualty counts from Iranian officials and from AFP have not lined up in every line. Teymouri first spoke of one dead and three wounded. IRNA, quoted by AP, spoke of one dead and four wounded on a ten-person crew. The difference is small and both accounts agree on the place, the hour and the fact of a hit.

What is missing is a flag, a name and an owner. In a six-month war that has already filled pages of incident lists, that gap matters. Insurers price named hulls. Charterers reroute around named incidents. A nameless strike off Qeshm still moves the risk premium on every ship that has to thread the same channel on Monday.

The strait is 33 kilometres across at its narrowest. Qeshm and Hengam sit on the Iranian side of that pinch. Control of the island is how Tehran argues that traffic is no longer an international given. The Monday meeting in Oman is meant to turn that argument into a corridor: enter through Iranian waters, leave through Omani waters, pay or do not pay depending on who writes the minute.

Sunday's fire does not settle that argument. It does tell every capital sending a minister to Muscat that the corridor is already being enforced by someone with a projectile and a target list. Whether the shot came from a US aircraft, an Iranian battery that missed its intended mark, or a third party is the question Teymouri left open when he used the word terrorist and declined to name a weapon.

UKMTO's language was dryer. A projectile hit a ship. A fire started. People were taken off. That is the record seafarers will read on the morning of the talks.

Brent has already spent this week above $100 after Houthi forces took Mocha and then Perim Island at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula. A second choke, at Hormuz, is the one Iran already holds. A dead sailor on a cargo run off Qeshm is the cost of that hold on a Sunday morning, a day before the diplomats sit down.

The open question for Monday is narrow. Will the ministers treat the Qeshm strike as proof that a managed corridor is urgent, or as proof that no corridor written in Oman will bind the people who fire first?