31JUL

Hormuz tanker count back to pre-war

2 min read

09:24UTC

Thirty-five tankers cleared the Strait of Hormuz on 2 July, the first pre-war-range count of the war, per Morgan Stanley data, as Brent held in the low $70s through the mourning week.

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Key takeaway

Hormuz tanker traffic is back to roughly normal numbers, easing war-risk premiums and steadying oil prices.

Thirty-five oil and gas tankers cleared the Strait of Hormuz on 2 July, the first time the daily vessel count has returned to its pre-war range, according to Morgan Stanley data cited by Al Jazeera ¹. the strait is a 33km channel carrying about a fifth of the world's traded oil, and the number of owners willing to make the passage tracks confidence more directly than any single day's throughput. That count is a different measure from the single-day record set on 25 June, when the strait moved 20 million barrels in 24 hours ; one counted barrels, this counts hulls.

Brent Crude held in the low $70s through the mourning week, essentially flat across three consecutive sessions of roughly 1% declines. Al Jazeera ties the drift to progress in US-Iran talks on maritime passage. Seven-day averages still sit below the same week last year, and the war premium that once pushed Brent above $116 has gone .

Thirty-five hulls in a single session say more than any ministerial claim about reopening, because insurers price war-risk cover off how many ships actually sail, not off a one-day barrel record. For a European or Asian buyer, that count moves the premium on each cargo, and those premiums feed straight through to the pump.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Thirty-five oil and gas tankers passed safely through the Strait of Hormuz on 2 July, matching the roughly 35-a-day rate that was normal before the war started in February. That sounds like good news, and Brent crude, the global oil price benchmark, has stayed calm in the low $70s through the week as a result. But normal ship traffic does not mean normal insurance. Many shipping companies sending vessels through are doing so without the standard war-risk cover that usually protects a tanker owner if it is attacked, because insurers and Iran's own transit rules still do not agree on the paperwork.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

London's Protection and Indemnity clubs cut hull war-risk premiums from a five per cent peak to around two per cent of vessel value by late June, but that remains twenty times the pre-conflict baseline of 0.1 per cent, so tankers transiting today pay an insurance cost structure that has not caught up with the traffic figures.

The US Development Finance Corporation's $40 billion Chubb-backed Hormuz reinsurance facility has had zero uptake since launch, blocked by the conflict between Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority registration requirement and OFAC compliance rules for London P&I clubs. That regulatory deadlock, not a lack of capital, is what keeps formal war-risk cover unavailable even as ships sail anyway.

What could happen next?

Consequence
A vessel count matching pre-war rates without matching insurance cover means individual shipowners, not the market as a whole, are absorbing the war-risk exposure on each transit.
Risk
Zero uptake on the $40 billion DFC-Chubb reinsurance facility leaves no formal backstop if a single high-profile strike interrupts the current run of calm transits.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from Qatar

Qatar

Primary parallel: Tanker traffic through the strait of Hormuz recovered to pre-war volumes within weeks of the 1988 Iran-Iraq War ceasefire, even though the underlying mine threat and the insurance market took years longer to normalise, the same lag now separating vessel counts from war-risk premiums.

Counter-parallel: Tanker traffic through the Suez Canal never recovered to pre-2023 levels after the Houthi Red Sea campaign began, even once individual convoys resumed transiting under naval escort, because insurers kept war-risk surcharges high enough to make the longer Cape of Good Hope route permanently cheaper for many operators.

Consensus view: S&P Global Commodity Insights assesses the 2 July count as backlog clearance rather than durable normalisation, since more than 500 vessels sat anchored in The Gulf as recently as mid-June and a single strong day can simply be that queue draining.

Counter-view: China's Ministry of Commerce points to the sustained China-bound share of Iranian crude, put by United Against Nuclear Iran at roughly $3.5 billion earned since the mid-June memorandum , as evidence Beijing's own tanker operators judge the corridor durably safe rather than merely temporarily clear.

Key tension: Whether the vessel count measures a genuine return of insurance-backed confidence, or simply the physical clearing of a queue built up during the worst weeks of restricted transit.

Sources:Al Jazeera

Mentions:China →Strait of Hormuz →Morgan Stanley →Al Jazeera →Brent Crude →Beijing →Cape of Good Hope →Iraq →Iran →Iran-Iraq War →Red Sea →

First Reported In

Update #146 · Iran's new leader wounded, not just hiding

Al Jazeera· 5 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Hormuz clears a record 20m barrels

The pre-war-range tanker count is a distinct hull-count confidence signal following the 25 June single-day barrel-volume record.

Occurred 25 Jun 2026

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Hormuz goes dark as tankers flee

The collapse to two transits a day reverses the near-pre-war rhythm of 35 tankers recorded 2 July.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

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This Event

Hormuz tanker count back to pre-war

A full hull count, not a one-day barrel record, is what eases war-risk insurance and steadies petrol prices.

Led to

Brent jumps 6% as oil ends its shrug

The tankers that cleared Hormuz at pre-war rates on 2 July now move under a repriced threat level.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

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Hormuz held severe as Guard herds ships

The brief pre-war-rate recovery on 2 July gives way to sustained SEVERE risk and forced northern routing.

Occurred 7 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Shipping and insurance underwriters

Underwriters can price Houthi strikes because the group announces its targets, but an unclaimed drone at Damietta and a mandatory Iranian insurance scheme both deny them a pattern to price against. War-risk premiums are increasingly being set by the absence of a claimant, not the scale of the damage.

Jordan

Azraq absorbed its fourth Iranian strike in seven weeks, again drawing no direct Jordanian retaliation, only an American one. Amman's exposure, hosting US basing without the Patriot density of Gulf allies, has not changed even as the war around it widens.

Houthi movement

The Houthis' 20 July blockade of Saudi-linked shipping is the injury Riyadh's new 43-nation coalition directly answers, yet the group itself was never asked to join and remains outside every proposal on the table. Sanaa-aligned commentators call the coalition a paper reassurance for insurers rather than a deployable force.

Egypt's Cabinet

Egypt confirmed the Damietta blaze was an attack, not an accident, on soil the war had never touched before. Cairo now faces an unclaimed threat to a facility supplying roughly 7% of its domestic gas, with no author to hold accountable and no pattern yet to defend against.

Oman

Muscat is running the only channel Iran will use, a voluntary Hormuz fee modelled on Malacca, but stayed out of Saudi Arabia's new naval coalition entirely. Oman's mediating leverage depends on treating Hormuz as shared and non-exclusive, the opposite of what Tehran is now demanding of it.

Iraq's Prime Minister

Al-Zaidi cancelled his first official Riyadh visit and convened the Coordination Framework, the coalition that keeps him in power and whose factions sit inside the PMF that Saudi jets just struck. He is caught between a five-year Saudi investment relationship and armed groups inside his own state he does not fully control.