Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said talks with Oman on a new shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz were in their final stages, in a report to the cabinet, news agency Fars reported on August 2.
The talks aim to establish a new traffic separation scheme through the strait that Tehran says would protect its sovereign rights, but Iran has stressed that any agreement with Oman would not by itself reopen the waterway, which it has kept closed to shipping during its confrontation with the US. The strait normally carries about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil.
The Iranian position sits against US President Donald Trump's claim, in a Truth Social post late on August 1, that the outlines of a deal to end the war had been agreed, including the immediate, complete and total opening of the strait and an end to Iran's nuclear threat.
Trump said he would order US forces to hold off on new strikes, claiming Middle East allies had reached the (parameters) of a deal to end the five-month war. Iran's acting defence minister Majid Ebn-e-Reza dismissed the pullback as psychological warfare, saying Iran's forces treated every threat as real.
Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the understanding with Oman was a necessary but not sufficient condition for reopening the strait, in an interview with state television.
"The closure of the Strait of Hormuz was not because of Oman, but because of US treaty violations, the naval blockade of Iran and the harassing actions the US has taken against Iran," Baghaei said. He said reopening the strait was a completely different equation.
Baghaei said the talks with Oman had run for about two months, beginning shortly after the ceasefire that ended the war, and that Iran had shared route maps prepared by its relevant agencies with the Omani side. He said the aim was to agree a route that was neither the northern nor the southern corridor, but one that secured both sides' sovereign rights.
He said the internationally recognised route approved by the International Maritime Organisation had, from 1968 until the war, passed entirely through Omani territorial waters. Under the ceasefire understanding, management of the strait was to be handled by Iran in consultation with Oman and regional states, he said.
The Fars news outlet said numerous ships remained stuck in the northern corridor of the strait in Iranian waters, able to pass only if Iran's armed forces allowed.
Baghaei said US intervention had repeatedly disrupted the talks rather than facilitating them, and that Iran would not let its national interests be affected by threats from US officials.
Iran issues Gulf-wide energy hit list if Trump carries through on threats to destroy Iran’s energy sector
US President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s energy sector in a joint operation with Israel, prompting Tehran to issue a hit list of some of the most valuable assets in the Gulf if he carried through with the threat.
Panicked that they would lose their biggest cash cows, which would also have serious implication for the already chaotic global energy markets, Gulf leaders called Trump persuaded him to backdown. But tension remain high after the failure of the 60-day ceasefire agreed in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) deal earlier this month.
The list included Saudi Arabia's Ghawar oil field and Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG complex – two of the biggest complexes of their kind in the world – if the US and Israel go ahead with a threatened new bombing campaign.
The state-linked Fars news agency reported the seven targets on August 1-2:
- Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, the world's largest onshore oilfield;
- Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq and Khurais processing complex, together with Ghawar handling more than 7mn barrels a day;
- the UAE's Ruwais refinery;
- the UAE's offshore Zakum field;
- Qatar's North Field gas reserve;
- Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG terminal, which handles roughly a fifth of the world's LNG trade;
- Kuwait's Burgan field;
- Bahrain's Sitra refinery;
- Israel's Leviathan and Tamar gas fields.
The threat follows reporting by CBS News that the US and Israel are planning what would be one of the harshest bombing campaigns of the conflict against Iranian power plants and refineries. “The US is locked and loaded,” Trump posted on social media on August 1 in the latest of string of extreme threats as he continues to flip flop between peace offers and threats of extreme violence. An Israeli official told CBS News that Israel had not been asked to join in the attack. The plan reportedly came up at a Trump cabinet meeting at Camp David on July 31, where some White House aides argued against it.
Iran-linked media framed the list as a deterrent rather than an imminent strike order, invoking the earlier, roughly six-week US-Israel-Iran war this summer, during which Tehran struck Qatar's South Pars gas processing facility in response to an attack on the field, prompting a public apology from Trump on Truth Social promising "it will not happen again."
The renewed threat lands as the Strait of Hormuz remains a live flashpoint: Iran said on July 21 the strait, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil trade passes, would stay closed even as Qatar, Egypt and Pakistan proposed a 10-day truce. A separate US strike in late July on the Darkhoveyn nuclear plant construction site drew a similar warning of retaliation from Tehran.
Trump said on August 2 he was cancelling the planned attack after Saudi Arabia and other regional powers, including Qatar, the UAE, Turkey and Pakistan, pressed Washington to hold off, citing progress toward a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with ships entering the Gulf routed through Iranian territorial waters and those leaving routed via Oman - contingent on Iran agreeing "rapidly." Tehran has not responded to the offer by the time of writing.
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