Iran announced on Wednesday 5 August that it had agreed the coordinates of a Strait of Hormuz shipping route with Oman1. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei had set out the shape of it three days earlier, on Sunday 2 August, saying the agreed route would be "neither the current northern route nor the current southern route, but rather a new route to be agreed upon by the two sides"2. Reporting on the same negotiating window, sourced to Axios, describes the opposite arrangement: the existing lanes divided, inbound traffic through Iranian waters and outbound through Omani3. Neither government has published a route document.
Hormuz is the only sea exit from the Gulf, and the tankers loading at Saudi, Kuwaiti, Emirati and Iraqi terminals have no alternative to it. Transits have run at a fraction of normal volume since July, after Iranian closure threats and mining emptied the lanes, so how the strait reopens governs when Gulf crude reaches buyers again. One account creates a corridor that does not exist today. The other allocates the corridor that does.
The gap between them is charted in months. A new corridor needs surveying, notices to mariners and mine clearance before a single hull can use it; a lane split needs none of that and could begin on a day's notice. Underwriters write war-risk clauses against named waters, and no clause can name a corridor whose coordinates sit inside an unpublished government announcement.
Baghaei also named the legal basis, Clause 5 of the Iran-US memorandum, under which management of the strait falls to Iran "in consultation with Oman and through dialogue with the region"4. Consultation gives Muscat no veto over an Iranian routing decision. That reading sits close to what deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi demanded on 30 July, Iran's own lane plus part of the other, and a long way from the voluntary-fee model Oman floated two days before that, borrowed from the Malacca Strait and carrying no penalty for a shipowner who declines to pay. Between those two positions lies the difference between a lane Iran polices and a lane Iran merely borders.
