Rezaei says Iran will draw a restricted zone beyond Hormuz and sanction any ship that enters

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Sunday night that Tehran will announce a restricted maritime zone outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days. Any ship that enters the zone without coordinating with Iran, he said on state television, will go onto an Iranian sanctions list that affects insurance and later passage.

Rezaei described the boundary as starting at "the line where the U.S. naval blockade begins," then running toward the strait and into the Persian Gulf on the far side. The zone would cover approaches to loading ports. He gave no coordinates on air. Maps, he said, are being finished with Oman for a new corridor whose entry and exit Iran would manage. That memorandum, he added, should be signed in the coming days.

He also said the strait itself is "completely closed and under the control of the armed forces." He called U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that tankers are still crossing a lie. Before Iran shut the waterway, Rezaei said, more than 100 ships carrying over 100 million tons of cargo moved through it each day. Now, he said, seven or eight ships carrying goods for Iran use it. Americans, he claimed, try to push five or six vessels through at high cost and those ships "usually" take hits. Iran has not chosen to sink them, he said, because they carry oil and a spill would damage the region.

Almanaque already recorded Kpler's 10-day average through Hormuz at about 10 commodity ships a day after Saturday's tanker strikes, the lowest since May, with oil volumes about 60 percent below pre-war levels. Rezaei's seven-to-eight figure is his own count of permitted traffic, not a third-party AIS read. The two numbers sit in the same range and describe the same squeeze.

A fifth of seaborne crude used to move through Hormuz. Insurers price war risk off the last confirmed strike, not off a future polygon on Iranian television. Listing a ship on an Iranian sanctions roster does not, by itself, cancel a London policy. It does add a second political risk on top of U.S. measures already in force and on top of the physical risk of being hit.

Rezaei framed the zone as part of a shift in how Iran fights and talks, aimed at raising cost for Washington. He did not say who will publish the coordinates, which force will intercept, or what happens to a warship that ignores the line. Those details decide whether the announcement is a legal notice or a shooting rule.

Oman has spent years keeping a quiet channel through Musandam. A corridor drawn jointly with Muscat would give Tehran a partner that shipowners already trust. It would also put Omani waters inside a system Iran says it will run. That is a different bargain from a unilateral exclusion zone.

The next public test is simple. Either the maps appear with lat-long lines and a start date, or they do not. Traffic already collapsed after the tanker hits. A published zone would tell masters whether the remaining trickle is tolerated, licensed, or hunted.