Iran says the Strait of Hormuz stays closed until Washington meets a written list

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said this week that Tehran is writing a list of conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Mediators asked for the list. Ending the regional war is on it, he said. Speaking through an interpreter on Al Manar, he added that Iran and Oman had agreed a shipping corridor with stretches in each country’s waters, and that ships could use a central channel if the United States met the terms.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy rejected American statements that the strait was already open. In a Friday statement it called those claims an attempt to manage oil prices and to hide military failure. Restrictions would continue, it said, until US military action against Iran stopped and related commitments were carried out. IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi had said on Wednesday that no vessel could pass without Iranian permission and that even the Omani-side route sat under Iranian control. If Washington would not accept Iran’s conditions, he said, the strait would not open.

Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was in Tehran on Thursday. He wrote that he had stressed freedom of navigation under international law. Rezaei met him and said the United States must take practical steps first. A June memorandum of understanding, mediated by Qatar and Pakistan, produced a ceasefire that did not hold. Disagreement over the strait was the point on which it broke.

Before February the waterway carried roughly one fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas. Traffic has largely stopped since Iran tightened passage after US and Israeli strikes. Two later ceasefire announcements, in April and June, were supposed to restore ships. They did not. Iranian conditions aired in public have included an end to what Tehran calls a blockade of its ports, compensation, and the lifting of sanctions. Rezaei did not say whether the new written list changes those headings.

The energy effect is already in other people’s ledgers. CREA put India’s extra fossil-import bill from the Hormuz shock at $22 billion between March and August. Spot LNG that feeds Indian city-gas networks has nearly doubled from pre-war levels, which is why Indraprastha Gas raised Delhi CNG by ₹3.89 a kilogram from Saturday. A parallel American answer appeared on Friday night: Trump’s claim of majority control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude. That deal, even if the contracts exist, cannot replace Gulf barrels this month.

Oman’s role is the one piece that could still move ships. Muscat has always treated the strait as a shared geography, not an Iranian gate. Rezaei’s corridor language accepts that geography on paper. The IRGC Navy’s Friday statement does not. Until those two Iranian voices say the same sentence, insurers will not price a transit and owners will not send hulls. The list Rezaei promised is the next document that matters. It has not been published.