Drone hits ship in the safe corridor

The IMO corridor was negotiated between Oman, the IMO and the US without any IRGC sign-off. The Guards rejected it publicly on 25 June as 'unacceptable and dangerous'. A transit corridor whose authority the waterway's de facto gatekeeper does not recognise carries a structural legitimacy gap: the Ever Lovely was in a corridor that existed on paper but not in IRGC doctrine.

The IRGC's Decentralised Mosaic Defence doctrine, activated after the February 2026 strikes, devolved launch authority to 31 autonomous provincial units to prevent command decapitation. A doctrine designed to survive decapitation creates a structural problem for central control: selective-enforcement orders from Tehran cannot be reliably translated into selective-enforcement actions on the water.

Striking inside an internationally sanctioned safe-passage corridor raises the escalatory threshold significantly above previous Hormuz attacks on vessels outside designated lanes. The fact the IRGC allowed South Korean vessels through the same day signals calibrated, not uncontrolled, escalation, but the act of breaching a humanitarian corridor sets a precedent with no obvious self-limiting logic.