Oman shelves Salalah Hormuz talks after Gulf states ask for delay

Oman cancelled the Monday meeting that was meant to put Iran and Gulf Arab governments in the same room over the Strait of Hormuz. Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi said late Sunday the gathering in Salalah had been postponed in the interests of consensus. No new date was named.

The Oman News Agency put the same decision in official language: the regional meeting would wait until conditions allowed a constructive dialogue. Albusaidi added on X that Muscat remained determined to promote talks that support stability and lasting cooperation in the region.

Iran did not treat the delay as a surprise. Mohammad Ali Bak, director general for Gulf affairs at the Iranian foreign ministry, told state media that some regional countries had asked for the pause and that Tehran and Muscat had agreed jointly. Iran, he said, would work with Oman on a later date.

By Monday afternoon the Iranian foreign ministry went further and named Saudi Arabia. It said Riyadh had requested the postponement and then linked that request to events in Yemen. The ministry called the Saudi explanation a diversion from the root causes of the crisis. The Saudi government did not issue an immediate reply.

What the meeting was for

The Salalah session was supposed to examine an Iran-Oman plan for shipping through the strait. Tasnim, the Iranian agency, has described the draft as a split route. Ships entering the Persian Gulf would travel through Iranian territorial waters. Part of the outbound lane would run through both Iranian and Omani waters.

That is a political document as much as a navigation chart. Since February the waterway has been disrupted by the wider war involving the United States, Israel and Iran. Commercial traffic has been thin. Insurance costs have risen. Diesel and crude prices have followed.

Iraq had said it would send a delegation. A Gulf official told Reuters that Saudi Arabia and Qatar would be represented by their foreign ministers. Bahrain had already ruled itself out. Manama said it would not sit with Tehran until diplomatic ties were restored.

Former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim had publicly urged the meeting to go ahead. He has argued for years that the Gulf Cooperation Council and Iran need a direct channel. The postponement leaves that channel closed for now.

Attacks that arrived first

The delay followed a weekend of incidents that made a joint communique harder to write. An Iranian cargo ship was attacked near Qeshm Island, off Iran's southern coast. Days earlier, drones launched from Iraq hit Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, the 7 million barrel-a-day line that lets Riyadh move crude to Red Sea terminals and bypass Hormuz. The line was shut. That removed the main alternative route Gulf producers use when the strait itself is unsafe.

Houthi forces, aligned with Iran, have also pressed Saudi-backed units in Yemen and taken more Red Sea islands. Riyadh has not confirmed the scale of any air response. The Houthis say Saudi jets struck them more than 100 times in two days.

Brent has been trading above $107 a barrel. U.S. diesel printed around $6.20 a gallon on Sunday. Energy ministers gathering in Houston this week for the G20 meeting will sit under that price, and under a closed Hormuz.

Who needs the waterway

About a fifth of the world's seaborne oil normally moves through the strait. Gulf producers still want it fully reopened. They have kept channels to Tehran even while condemning attacks on shipping and on their own energy plants. The Salalah meeting would have been one of the few multilateral tables to put those governments next to Iran since the war began.

Oman has spent weeks trying to turn that interest into a written arrangement. The sultanate is the usual broker. It shares the waterway with Iran at the Musandam Peninsula. Its diplomats can talk to both sides without the theatre that attaches to Riyadh or Washington.

The United States was not expected at Salalah. That was part of the design. Gulf states wanted a regional conversation that did not wait on a Washington-Tehran track that has produced no ceasefire. The postponement shows the limit of that design. Saudi Arabia can still stop the meeting by asking Oman to wait.

Iran says it will coordinate a new date. Oman says it wants consensus first. Until both exist, tankers will keep using whatever lanes insurers will still cover, and the price of diesel will keep carrying the cost of a meeting that did not happen.