Day 79: Tehran prints the toll book; Delhi joins the queue

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi disclosed to his Indian counterpart Jaishankar on 15 May that roughly 13 Indian ships are queued for Hormuz transit while Iranian military personnel guide cleared vessels through mine zones. Araghchi separately confirmed that Tehran and Muscat have opened consultations on future Strait governance, though no signed text has emerged.

India is now the fourth state operating inside Iran's bilateral passage system with no written agreement, and if Oman, which legally co-administers the southern half of the strait, endorses Iran's framework, the Western coalition's legal case for free passage loses its strongest regional backing. Read full version ↓

The Pentagon was reported on 12 May to be considering naming any resumed Iran military operation 'Operation Sledgehammer', on the theory that a new operation name restarts the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock that expired without a congressional vote on 29 April.

Most independent legal experts, including scholars at the Lawfare Institute and The Brookings Institution, assess the rename argument as novel but unlikely to survive scrutiny, since the 1973 law attaches the clock to the fighting itself, not the name on the mission. Read full version ↓

Donald Trump posted an artificial-intelligence-generated image on Truth Social on 17 May showing himself alongside US Navy warships and Iranian vessels, captioned 'It was the calm before the storm'. Two days earlier, The New York Times reported that US and Israeli military preparations for an Iran strike were at their highest intensity since the war began on 28 February.

The image carries no legal force; the strike-preparation reporting underneath it does. Chatham House analysts tracking the conflict note the unsigned verbal-kinetic gap has now reached 79 days, the longest of any comparable US military operation in the post-Vietnam era. Read full version ↓

The BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi on 14-15 May ended without a joint statement after the UAE, which Iranian drones struck on 10 May, blocked any text that did not condemn Iran for attacks on neighbouring states. Iran demanded condemnation of the US and Israel instead. India, hosting the meeting, issued a summary document in place of the failed declaration.

This was the first time a Gulf BRICS member publicly broke with Iran inside the bloc Tehran has described as the multilateral alternative to Western order. The South African Institute of International Affairs had flagged the Iran-UAE veto pair as a structural risk at BRICS's 2024 Kazan expansion. Read full version ↓

Hengaw, a Norway-based Kurdish rights monitor, documented two further arrests on 16-17 May: Sabah Bevara was violently arrested in the Kurdish town of Piranshahr in West Azerbaijan; Abbas Mamousi was detained in Dehloran and transferred to Ilam Central Prison. Both cases extend a running cluster Hengaw has tracked across northwestern Iran since 13 May.

The wartime judicial apparatus runs on its own calendar, independent of diplomatic meetings in Delhi or social media posts in Washington. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran cites Hengaw as its primary granular source for this detention pattern, which forms the evidentiary basis for future international accountability proceedings. Read full version ↓

Iran's state broadcaster Tasnim aired a 17 May interview in which Majlis security committee chairman Ebrahim Azizi confirmed the €50-million parliamentary bounty bill on Donald Trump, saying the Iranian government would be obligated to pay if anyone carried out what he called 'this religious and ideological mission'. The bill remains under parliamentary review, not yet voted.

The IRGC-linked Tasnim broadcast upgrades the bill from a single opposition-outlet report to state-media-endorsed parliamentary fact. The International Crisis Group's Iran team notes that when IRGC-affiliated media explicitly corroborate a Majlis bill, passage probability rises regardless of the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic posture. Read full version ↓

Iranian parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared on 17 May that the world stands 'at the cusp of a new order', quoting Chinese President Xi Jinping's 'transformation unseen in a century' and crediting Iran's 70 days of resistance with accelerating the shift. No bilateral instrument accompanied the declaration.

Carnegie Endowment analysts note Ghalibaf is annexing Chinese rhetorical authority to the Iran war narrative without Beijing's explicit endorsement, exploiting the gap between China's refusal to condemn Iran and its equal refusal to endorse the conflict. The declaration runs directly counter to Araghchi's simultaneous back-channel negotiations, marking the widest public divergence between Iran's legislative and diplomatic tracks since February. Read full version ↓