US Central Command (CENTCOM), the American military command covering the Middle East, said at 20:22 BST on Monday 3 August that its naval blockade of Iranian ports had redirected 44 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two1. Its own published figure the previous day was 35 redirected2. That is a rise of about 26 per cent inside roughly 24 hours, offered without explanation, and the first time the command has attached boarding figures to this operation at all.
The two boardings, disclosed for the first time on 3 August, are the escalation buried in the tally. Redirecting a merchant ship is a warning delivered over the radio; putting an armed team on its deck is enforcement, conducted at close quarters, in Iranian approaches, while two governments negotiate a reopening. A single shot fired on a merchant deck would end the diplomacy running alongside it.
Donald Trump told reporters the following day, Tuesday 4 August, that the strait would reopen "soon", and that Iran would be hit "really hard" if it did not3. Read the two together and the sequence inverts: the rhetoric softened while the enforcement intensified. This is the same command that announced no new military action against Iran on 24 July as the president weighed a larger operation, then resumed bombing within hours of the IRGC's second strike on Jordan's Azraq base on 30 July.
Tehran draws a hard line between the two closures, and the line matters. CENTCOM's counter-blockade stops oil leaving Iranian ports, and Washington controls it unilaterally. The Hormuz transit collapse is a separate phenomenon with separate causes, and reopening the strait would not by itself lift the blockade Iran most needs lifted in order to sell. Nothing a bank, an insurer or a port authority actually reads has changed since 24 July, a Treasury quiet spell this file first noted on 3 August, which leaves 44 redirected hulls as the most concrete American act of the week.
