UKMTO confirmed a vessel was struck by an unknown projectile 7 nautical miles east of Fujairah, sustaining steel plate damage. All crew were reported safe. The vessel was Israeli-owned, according to The Times of Israel. No attribution has been confirmed — UKMTO reported the projectile source as unknown.
Fujairah port itself was hit overnight on 3 March, a strike that targeted The Gulf's primary ship-to-ship fuel bunkering hub and the exit point for the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline — the 1.5 million-barrel-per-day conduit built specifically to bypass the strait of Hormuz. That attack degraded the fixed infrastructure. This one targets a commercial vessel in the approaches — a different layer of the same chokepoint.
The Israeli ownership is consistent with targeting patterns established in the Red Sea since late 2023, where Houthi forces selected targets by vessel ownership, flag state, and commercial affiliation. If confirmed here, it would indicate an actor with access to commercial shipping databases and the operational capacity to act on that intelligence in contested waters. The distinction matters: indiscriminate attacks close a waterway to everyone; discriminate attacks close it selectively while leaving a political argument that neutral shipping is safe. Neither is true once P&I clubs have withdrawn cover, but the targeting logic shapes how governments and insurers assess the risk.
With Hormuz traffic already down 80%, Fujairah's eastern anchorage had been one of the last positions where commercial vessels could hold without transiting the strait. More than 150 tankers were anchored in Gulf waters awaiting resolution as of 1 March. A vessel struck at anchor or in the approaches faces a threat it cannot manoeuvre away from — its position is predictable from publicly available port schedules and AIS transponder data.
