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

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran will announce a restricted zone in the Persian Gulf that begins at the US naval blockade line and runs into Gulf waters. Any vessel that enters the zone, he said on state television, will be added to an Iranian sanctions list. He repeated the threat on X on Tuesday, 8 September, and tied it to what he called economic warfare by Washington.

“In recent days, Washington has received a clear warning from Iran’s new missiles,” Rezaei wrote. “Economic warfare will be met by a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter. The operational posture toward US warships and bases has been fundamentally recalibrated.” He pointed to a Qassem Basir ballistic missile that Iranian media said was fired at US ships near the Strait of Hormuz. The US military said its ships evaded the attacks.

Rezaei also said maps for a new international corridor through the strait, lying in Iranian and Omani waters and managed in part by Iran, have been agreed and should be signed in the coming days. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told reporters the memorandum with Oman is in its final stages and will include a temporary safe route through the chokepoint. The talks have run since a fragile mid-June ceasefire. The text has not been published. Coordinates for the restricted zone have not been published either.

The timing follows a weekend exchange. The United States struck three Iranian oil tankers on Saturday after Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacks on American warships. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the era of proportional responses had ended and promised a faster, heavier reply. Rezaei told IRIB that Iran will commit to keeping Hormuz open only when the United States stops threats and attacks. That sentence makes the strait a bargaining chip, not a constant.

Hormuz still matters for the price of oil even when tanker traffic is already distorted by blockade and war. Brent traded near $98 to $99 as the Houthi attacks on Saudi energy sites and the Gulf warnings hit the same tape. India, China, Japan and South Korea remain the large buyers of crude that used to move through the strait in volume. A restricted zone that starts at a blockade line is a legal claim layered on a military fact. Ships already divert. Rezaei’s list would add an Iranian penalty on top of the American one.

How that penalty would be enforced is the open question. Iran cannot easily seize ships inside a US-patrolled box. It can harass, sanction on paper, and fire missiles. The US can disable tankers that try to reach Iranian ports, as CENTCOM has done through the summer. Each side is drawing a line the other does not recognise. The Oman corridor, if it is signed, would be the only document that both a Gulf sultanate and Tehran put their names on. Buyers will read the map, not the adjectives.

Rezaei gave no date for the zone announcement beyond “the coming days.” Until the coordinates appear, the market is pricing a threat, not a buoy line. The useful detail is the starting point he did name: the US blockade perimeter. That means the restricted zone is defined against an American geometry, not against the old traffic separation scheme in the strait. If the maps arrive this week, insurers and skippers will have something to plot. If they do not, the sentence on X remains a warning without a chart.