Trump says US Navy has cleared mines from Hormuz shipping lane

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 25 August, that the US Navy has removed or detonated every mine in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz. He posted the claim on Truth Social and warned that any ship or boat that lays a new mine will be “immediately and systematically destroyed.”

Two US officials with direct knowledge of the work told Axios that the Navy has cleared the Traffic Separation Scheme, the median lane that sits between Oman and Iran. That is the lane tankers used before the war. After mines appeared, many captains shifted south toward the Omani coast. Clearing the middle lane would let two-way traffic resume under US air cover, those officials said.

Trump did not say how many mines were found or how they were disposed of. A later account in Marine Insight, citing US officials, said underwater drones first surveyed the strait and located more than 100 mines, which private contractors then detonated or lifted. That figure has not been confirmed in a Pentagon statement.

What the strait carried before February

Before 28 February, when the United States and Israel opened air strikes on Iran, about 20 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and a large share of liquefied natural gas moved through the strait. The Joint Maritime Information Center put pre-war traffic near 138 ships a day. After the first week of fighting that number collapsed to a handful of crossings.

Iran laid mines and asserted control over the northern corridor in its territorial waters. The United States argued that the strait remains an international passage. Three routes formed: an Iranian-controlled northern path, the old median lane, and a southern path in Omani waters that the US recommended. Attacks on ships using the southern route later pushed even that traffic down.

Oil prices swung with each change in the count. The International Monetary Fund said this week that the world absorbed the shock better than feared, in part because of investment in data centres. That assessment does not restore the barrels that stayed on the wrong side of the strait.

Iran, Oman and the corridor talks

Iran and Oman have been negotiating a temporary commercial corridor. Deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi said last week that a seven-mile lane would run through Iranian waters and stay closed to military ships. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also spoken of sharing revenues from the strait and defining maritime zones. Trump’s announcement undercuts the idea that only an Iran-Oman deal can reopen the median lane.

Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority said on Sunday that vessels that break Iranian transit rules will face limits on later passages. Tehran listed 45 ships for alleged violations, including two Indian-owned vessels. There was no Iranian reply to Trump’s mine statement by Wednesday evening.

Trump added that the US Space Force is watching “every square inch of the Strait” as well as Pickaxe Mountain and three nuclear sites he said the United States has already destroyed. He called the mine rule a “Zero Tolerance policy.”

Clearing the lane does not by itself restore 138 crossings a day. Insurers, owners and crews still have to decide whether a presidential statement and two unnamed officials are enough to send a very large crude carrier through a 21-mile gap that has been mined, struck and blockaded since February. The next useful number is the daily transit count from Kpler or the JMIC, not the wording on Truth Social.