Iran says it will list terms before any Hormuz reopening

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said on Thursday that Tehran is drawing up a written list of conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Mediators asked for the list. Ending the regional war, he said, belongs on it. He spoke through an interpreter on Al Manar and to IRNA as Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, finished a day of talks in Tehran with President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and speaker-negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Rezaei described an Iran-Oman corridor that would run partly in Omani water and partly in Iranian water, with ships using a marked central channel if Washington met the terms. A senior Iranian source said on Wednesday that the two governments were still writing the details, a day after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed they had already agreed how to share traffic control and revenue. The gap between those two sentences is the present state of the file.

An IRGC spokesman set three public tests for any reopening: the United States must lift what Tehran calls a blockade of Iranian ports, pay compensation for war damage, and remove sanctions. Rezaei added a threat aimed at the American economy. If the blockade continues, he told state broadcaster IRIB, Iran will target U.S. economic interests “fully and with intensity and force.”

President Trump said the United States is not talking to Iran and is concentrating on economic pressure. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that campaign continues until Iran negotiates in terms Washington accepts. Trump has also said the strait is open. Vessel tracking and insurer behaviour say otherwise. Before the war started in February, the waterway carried about one-fifth of seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas. Traffic has been thin for six months. Ceasefire texts in April and June were meant to restore it. They did not hold. An earlier memorandum on shipping collapsed within three weeks after the two sides read Iran’s authority over the lane in opposite ways. Trump called that memorandum over.

Qatar, Oman and Pakistan have all sent teams in the past week. Doha put a temporary corridor and a joint mine-clearance job on the table and, in a public note, reminded Tehran of freedom of navigation under international law. That is the legal frame coastal states already owe the rest of the world in a strait used for international navigation. Iran’s conditions treat reopening as a bargain for sanctions relief and war payments. Washington treats the same water as a route that should never have been closed.

The International Maritime Organization has separately counted 19 seafarers killed and at least 6,000 still stuck on ships that cannot leave the wider theatre. Those numbers sit outside Rezaei’s list and outside the White House talking points. They are the human remainder of a six-month war that began with a U.S.-Israeli campaign and an Iranian counter-blockade, and that has now settled into a paperwork fight over who writes the first line of a corridor agreement that does not yet exist.

Until that list is published, and until someone in Washington answers it in writing, the central channel Rezaei described is a drawing. Insurers, skippers and oil desks will price the strait as closed until the drawing has coordinates, a start date and a navy that will not shoot at the ships that use it.