Iran and Gulf ministers to meet in Salalah over a temporary Hormuz corridor

Iran's Foreign Ministry said Friday that Gulf littoral states will meet in Oman on Monday to discuss a temporary way to run ships through the Strait of Hormuz, the first gathering of its kind since the United States and Israel opened the war against Iran in February.

Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters in Tehran that Iran, Iraq and other coastal states would attend. He framed the meeting as a step toward "trust and cooperation among regional countries" without what he called the "destructive and divisive interference" of outside powers. Iranian media listed the expected ministers as those of Iran, Iraq, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi are due to brief the room on talks that have been running for weeks.

The Financial Times, citing two people briefed on the plan, said the venue is Salalah, on Oman's southern coast, and that a number of states have already confirmed. Details were not locked, one of the people said, but the meeting was expected to go ahead.

The draft corridor

Tehran and Muscat said late last month that they were finishing a phased framework. Under the version described to the FT, vessels would enter the strait through Iranian waters and leave mostly through Omani waters. Oman has territorial water in the strait and has spent the war trying to stay usable as a channel between the two sides.

Iran has restricted passage since the opening days of the conflict. Ships now need Iranian permission. Tehran has discussed a system of service fees. Vessels that ignore the rules have been hit. The United States, in parallel, has imposed a naval blockade on traffic to and from Iranian ports and has periodically struck the Iranian coast to contest control of the waterway.

Baghaei said Iran was committed to shipping security in the strait but that this could not be guaranteed while US "aggressive actions and illegal interventions," including the blockade and what he called an economic war, continued. One person briefed on the Oman track told the FT the Iranian and Omani aim is to get the GCC on board and then use that consensus to press Washington to lift the blockade. GCC states, the same person said, want any arrangement to be temporary and to keep their own ships moving.

Why Monday is not a peace conference

A fifth of the world's oil used to pass Hormuz. That flow is the reason diesel in the United States printed $6.06 a gallon this week and why Brent has been above $100. A corridor that works on paper still needs the US Navy to accept it and Iranian forces to stop treating unauthorised hulls as targets. Diplomats quoted in the reporting have been explicit: a full reopening requires a deal between Washington and Tehran, not only among the coastal states.

The meeting is still a change in the room. It would be the first time GCC foreign ministers have sat with a senior Iranian official since February. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been on the receiving end of Iranian and allied strikes. They are also BRICS members sitting with President Masoud Pezeshkian in New Delhi this weekend. The two tracks, the summit and the strait, are now running on the same calendar.

Oman has used this method before. It hosted the back channel that produced the 2015 nuclear deal and has spent 2026 convening a Joint Hormuz Committee with Tehran. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said that committee held its first session in Muscat earlier this month.

Trump's line, and the midterms

US President Donald Trump said this week he has no regrets about the war. "I would do exactly as I did," he told reporters, rejecting claims that some of his own supporters have gone cold on the conflict. He has also said prices will fall when the war ends, which he has now timed for after November's elections. That is a political calendar, not a shipping one.

Monday's session in Salalah will not reopen Hormuz by itself. It will show whether Saudi Arabia and the UAE are willing to put their names on a temporary Iranian-Omani corridor, and whether Tehran will accept a text that does not include an immediate end to the American blockade. Those two answers will decide if the next tanker that wants to leave the Gulf has a published route, or only a set of threats.