IRGC says Iran and Oman will split Hormuz waters and transit fees

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on 26 August that Tehran and Muscat had agreed how to divide the waters of the Strait of Hormuz and the money earned from traffic through it. Spokesman Hossein Mohebbi, quoted by the state-run Sepah News agency, said the two sides had talked for about a month and reached results both could accept. He accused the United States of blocking the last steps and did not say how the fees would be levied or split.

That claim went further than the joint statement issued a day earlier by the two foreign ministries. Abbas Araghchi and Oman’s Badr Albusaidi had spoken only of an “interim framework” for restarting commercial transits and of coordinated mine-clearing. They did not mention revenue.

Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, speaking on state television on Tuesday night, sketched the geometry. Ships entering the Persian Gulf from the Gulf of Oman would travel through Iranian waters. Ships leaving would use a route that runs partly through Iranian water and partly through Oman’s. The temporary corridor would be about seven miles wide. Tehran and Muscat would then have 30 to 60 days to write a lasting traffic plan. If that understanding becomes binding, he said, “no military vessel will be permitted to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. No military vessel at all.”

Army spokesman Mohammad Akraminia added that vessels would move under Iranian surveillance and only with Iranian permission. Gharibabadi tied a full reopening to a 17 June memorandum with Washington: sanctions relief, an end to the naval blockade of Iranian ports, and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The United States has not signalled that it will meet those terms.

A senior Iranian source told Reuters the same day that the deal was not finished and that both governments were still working through details. The gap between Mohebbi’s announcement and that caution is the story. The Guards asserted a fee. The foreign ministry described a sketch. Oman has not published a matching revenue text.

Before the war that began in late February, about one-fifth of seaborne oil and a large share of liquefied natural gas moved through Hormuz. Daily traffic sat near 130 to 138 ships. At points this year transits fell to single digits. A June spike, under a UN-backed southern track along the Omani coast, still sat far below the old baseline. Insurers, owners and navies have been choosing among a northern Iranian corridor, a mid-strait lane and the Omani shore route. A two-state fee on top of that choice would change the cost of every barrel that still uses the waterway.

Qatar’s prime minister is in Tehran this week on a separate de-escalation track. President Donald Trump has said he is in no hurry to talk and that both economic and military pressure work. The Guards’ revenue line sits inside that argument. If Iran and Oman can charge for passage, Tehran gains a stream that does not depend on a White House signature. If the United States treats a ban on military ships as a closure of an international strait, the legal fight moves from mines to tolls.

None of this reopens the strait on Thursday. Commercial captains still need a route that their clubs will insure. The IRGC has given them a map and a price without a published tariff. Until Muscat puts the same numbers on paper, the revenue deal is a claim, and the ships remain the measure of whether anyone believes it.