Iran says it will draw an exclusion zone beyond Hormuz after US hits three tankers

Mohsen Rezaei, the new head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran will declare an exclusion zone outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days. The zone, he said, would run some distance on either side of the strait and would begin "from the line of the US naval blockade." The announcement followed a fresh exchange of fire against ships.

US Central Command said American forces struck three Iranian oil tankers, including one off Kharg Island, Iran's main crude export terminal, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles at two US Navy ships. The IRGC then said it had targeted three tankers it described as sailing unauthorised routes in the strait, plus three US-linked vessels elsewhere. State media in Tehran said a US vessel had tried to enter an area Iran calls restricted.

The strait has been contested for months. After a US-Iran memorandum in mid-June, attacks on commercial ships resumed. Named casualties of that earlier phase included the Singapore-flagged container ship Ever Lovely, the Panama-flagged tanker Kiku, the Qatari LNG carrier Al Rekayyat and the Saudi-flagged Wedyan. CENTCOM has at various points reported redirecting dozens of commercial ships, disabling steering gear on vessels bound for Iranian ports, and striking IRGC minelaying teams. Iran has answered with claims of hits on tankers using "unsafe and illegal" routes and with strikes on US-linked targets in the region.

Rezaei's exclusion zone is an attempt to turn those ad hoc interdictions into a drawn line. If the line starts at the US blockade, Iran is saying the two perimeters will touch. That geometry leaves little room for a neutral corridor. Insurers and shipowners already price Hormuz as a war risk. A formal Iranian box beyond the strait would extend that premium into the Gulf of Oman.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the "rules of the game" had changed and that any further attack on Iranian interests would draw a faster response. The United States has not published a matching statement on Rezaei's map. CENTCOM's last detailed public list of boarded, diverted and disabled ships dates from early August, when it said 44 commercial vessels had been redirected, two disabled and two boarded.

Kharg Island matters because it is where Iranian barrels leave. A US strike on a tanker off Kharg is a strike at the loading end of Iran's oil chain, not only at ships in the narrows. Iran's claimed hits on three tankers inside the strait are the reciprocal move: if you hit our export hulls, we hit hulls we say should not be there.

No independent confirmation of the latest six tanker attacks had been published by Monday afternoon. Readers should treat both CENTCOM's three and the IRGC's three as claims under investigation. The exclusion zone, if it is actually gazetted with coordinates, will be the document that changes routing software. Until those coordinates appear, the strait remains what it has been since summer: a waterway with two navies writing rules in real time.