Iran says a new Gulf exclusion zone will start at the US blockade line

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said a new restricted zone in the Persian Gulf will begin where the United States naval blockade of Iranian ports already starts and will run into the Gulf itself. Any ship that enters the zone, he told state television, will go onto an Iranian sanctions list. He added that maps of a new international corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, drawn in Iranian and Omani waters and managed by Iran, have been agreed and should be signed in the coming days.

Rezaei repeated the threat on Tuesday on X. "Economic warfare will be met by a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter," he wrote. He also said Washington had received "a clear warning from Iran's new missiles" and that the operational posture toward US warships and bases had been "fundamentally recalibrated." Iranian media said a Qassem Basir ballistic missile was fired at US ships near the strait. The US military said its ships evaded the attacks.

The timing is the point. Six months after US and Israeli strikes on Iran opened the present war, tanker traffic through Hormuz is already thin. Kpler, the shipping-data firm, counted 77 vessels in the strait last week, 28 percent below the recent run of figures. A senior US official told Al Jazeera the waterway remains fully open and under US Navy control. Rezaei's condition for keeping it open is that the United States "stop the sabotage, threats and attacks on Iran."

About a fifth of seaborne oil still has to pass this gap between Iran and the Musandam peninsula. Brent traded near $98 a barrel on Tuesday, WTI above $93. Indian crude markers moved with them. The rupee opened weak in Mumbai as traders priced the same risk into the import bill. Rezaei's zone, if it is drawn as described, would sit against the American blockade line so that a ship obeying one set of instructions could breach the other.

Stephen Zunes at the University of San Francisco told Al Jazeera that Iranian ships and aircraft trying to police such a zone would be exposed to US fire. That is the operational limit. The political use is different. A sanctions list that names hulls can raise insurance premia even if no Iranian boat comes alongside. Underwriters have already been repricing Hormuz risk for months. A formal corridor under Iranian "management," even on paper, gives Tehran a document to wave at shipowners who still want a receipt.

Oman is the other name in Rezaei's sentence. Muscat has spent the year as a channel between Washington and Tehran and as a coastal state whose waters form the southern bank of the strait. An Iran-Oman corridor would need Omani signatures to mean anything in a chart folio. Those signatures have not been published. Rezaei spoke as if they were close.

The same morning, Yemen's Houthis struck energy sites in southern Saudi Arabia and wounded 73 people, according to the Saudi-led coalition. Fires forced a temporary halt at some facilities. Oil jumped again on that news. The two files are not the same war, but they price into the same barrel. A restricted zone that starts at an American line, a missile claim the US Navy says it beat, and a 28 percent drop in weekly transits are now the public facts of the strait. The maps, Rezaei says, come next.