Eleven Miles Northeast of Limah

Three parties described the Strait of Hormuz in three incompatible ways on the last day of July, and only one description can be checked against anything. Ships went where ships went. They went through Omani territorial water, which is also the only water anyone was shot at in, and Oman has said nothing in public about either fact.

A projectile struck the engine room of a Bermuda-flagged tanker eleven nautical miles northeast of Limah on 31 July. Nobody was hurt. Later the same day a second projectile came down beside another vessel twenty-one miles northeast of Khasab. Both positions sit in Musandam, the Omani peninsula that forms the southern jaw of the Strait of Hormuz.

That same day Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority announced it would issue no transit permits whatsoever until the United States ended military operations in the region. Iran's Supreme National Security Council promised to strengthen control over the strait and close other waterways, adding that the price would be paid by American citizens and by the global energy market. US Central Command said the strait remained open to all vessel traffic.

Three statements about one waterway inside twenty-four hours, and no two of them describe the same place.

One thing in that window can be checked independently, which is where the ships actually went. At least four transited, all of them by the southern Omani route and none of them holding an Iranian permit. Two were fired on there.

This has been building for months and it has now arrived somewhere specific. Iran maintains a traffic separation scheme it calls lawful and expects vessels to use. Ships have been leaving it. The southern route through Omani territorial water is the alternative, and it serves as the alternative precisely because it runs outside Iranian administration. Washington's claim that the strait is open rests on that corridor. Tehran's claim to control the strait requires closing it.

The contest has migrated into the water of a country that has said nothing.

Oman spent July as everyone's mediator. It carried a Gulf-backed proposal to Tehran that would have placed the strait under joint regional management funded by voluntary contributions from shippers, modelled on an arrangement that works in the Strait of Malacca. Washington refused it for conceding fees. Tehran refused it for conceding supervision. The mandate to write that proposal came from a clause in an agreement both of them had signed.

Muscat now sits well past the point where mediation describes its position. Its territorial sea carries the only traffic anyone records and absorbs the only fire anyone records.

At the other chokepoint the movement went the opposite way. On 1 August the Houthi body that deals with international shipping companies declared that passage through Bab al-Mandeb remains free of charge and that services for authorised vessels are voluntary and cost-free. That was a denial. Days earlier, regional sources had described the group preparing a transit-fee authority modelled on Iran's own.

Read the word authorised before reading the word free. Saudi and Israeli shipping stays under Houthi blockade. Passage costs nothing and still has to be granted.

Two readings of the Iranian move are available and the evidence chooses between them for nobody. A permit regime suspended as leverage is one. A permit regime abandoned because no owner was ever going to buy a permit that voids the ship's insurance is the other. Every fact on the record fits both.

What survives the choice is the geography. The strait that ships use has moved south, into water Oman has never agreed to defend and has not been asked about in public.