The Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC), a US-led multinational naval reporting body, issued an advisory on Saturday 20 June warning of possible mines in the standard Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) lanes and telling ships to avoid them1. It cleared one alternative: the southern corridor through Oman's territorial waters, mine-free, transponders on, no coordination with the US Navy required. US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported that 55 merchant vessels carried more than 17 million barrels through the strait that day, all of them on the Omani route2.
The corridor matters because it changes who governs the strait's traffic. The mined TSS lanes sit in the international channel, where Iran claims a transit-passage jurisdiction. The cleared lane runs through waters Oman controls as a coastal state. With every cargo pushed onto the southern route, practical authority over the strait shifts to Muscat, a long-neutral mediator that now holds a gatekeeper's seat nobody legislated for it. The barrels are moving on Oman's geography, not on Iran's permission and not on Trump's toll-free reopening order.
The mines did this by accident. The IRGC laid them to enforce its closure, and the unintended effect was to channel every ship into the one lane the corps does not police. Clearing the international TSS lanes takes a minimum of 40 to 50 days of sweeping, on the prior assessment that mines rather than insurance were keeping the strait shut. That timetable locks traffic onto the Omani route through the summer, deepening Muscat's hold the longer the standard lanes stay closed.
One piece remains unconfirmed. The Lloyd's and Chubb $400m war-risk consortium was launched for exactly this kind of crossing, but whether it has actually underwritten the 55 ships, or whether they are moving without war-risk cover, has not been established in public reporting.
