Hormuz commodity traffic falls to 10 ships a day after Saturday's tanker strikes

Commodity shipping through the Strait of Hormuz fell to a 10-day moving average of 10 vessels a day on 7 September, the lowest reading since May, according to Kpler. The same average had been above 15 on Friday and near 13 on Saturday. Two vessels transited on Saturday. Six transited on Sunday, most of them on the Iranian side of the channel.

U.S. Central Command said American forces struck three Iranian oil tankers on Saturday, one of them off Kharg Island, after what it described as unprovoked attempts by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to attack two U.S. warships. The IRGC navy said the same day that it had targeted three tankers on unauthorised routes in the strait and three additional U.S. vessels elsewhere. Maritime intelligence firm Marisks named the Iranian tankers as Downy, Stark I and Kylo, also known as Noxen, and called the exchange a major escalation because commercial hulls were being used as tools of economic pressure.

A New York Times count of public attack records put Iranian strikes on ships at 12 in August and 11 in July. At least 23 ships were hit in the waterway across those two months. A Saudi vessel was struck near Oman's coast last week, killing two crew. Two other sailors died in August attacks, making that month the deadliest for merchant crews in the strait since March.

Oil volumes tell a slower story than the daily ship count. TankerTrackers.com put average daily oil through the strait at 6.7 million barrels in the seven days to Thursday, nearly 60 percent below the months before the war opened at the end of February. Before that campaign an average of 138 ships of all types crossed each day, according to the Joint Maritime Information Center. After the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February the number collapsed to a handful.

On Sunday Kpler recorded one very large crude carrier and three bulk carriers entering the strait with metals, grains or oilseeds. A products tanker that had loaded at a Saudi port tried to exit and was turned back, LSEG data showed. The U.S. Navy says it is escorting more ships than before. Escorts have not stopped hits. They have also not restored the pre-war lane.

Hormuz remains open in the narrow sense that hulls still pass. It is closed in the sense that owners, insurers and crews now treat the crossing as a combat zone with a 10-ship rhythm. The Saturday strikes on named Iranian tankers, and the IRGC reply against named commercial and U.S. targets, erase the old line between naval fire and merchant traffic. That line is what kept 138 ships moving. Ten ships a day is what remains of it.