Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, said in a post on X on 2-3 September that "during last night's operation, more naval mines were laid along the illicit routes south of the strait of Hormuz"1. This desk has not read the post itself and reports it as attributed to him. The claim lands on the same southern corridor a US admiral had described as swept on Friday 28 August.
Both statements can be true at once. Water swept on a Friday can be re-seeded the following Wednesday, and a clearance operation certifies a moment rather than a condition. The narrower claim worth making is that nobody outside the two militaries can verify either version: no neutral hydrographic survey of those routes has been published, and neither Tehran nor Washington has released one of its own.
The decision that follows sits with a merchant master rather than with either government. A charterer pricing the southern approach this week is choosing between the word of a navy that is bombing Iran and the word of a force that is firing at shipping, with no third account to weigh them against. A Gulf Cooperation Council committee spent August examining transit restrictions in this strait and in Bab el-Mandeb, which treats passage as something to be negotiated rather than assumed.
The word "illicit" in Zolfaghari's phrasing does work that the mines do not. It describes the American escort corridor as an unlawful intrusion rather than as a protected lane, which places the legal argument alongside the ordnance and keeps it available whether or not a single mine was laid.
