17AUG

Bab el-Mandeb thins to 7.5 tankers a day

3 min read

15:37UTC

A Windward assessment dated 30 July put Saudi-linked tanker transits through Bab el-Mandeb down 46% after Lloyd's-market war-risk cover for those hulls lapsed on 24 July. Total crossings are down 22% since the blockade declaration.

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Key takeaway

Insurers, not missiles, cut Saudi-linked Bab el-Mandeb tanker transits to about 7.5 a day from 24 July.

A Windward maritime-risk assessment dated 30 July, republished by Hellenic Shipping News, put total Bab el-Mandeb crossings down 22% since the Houthi blockade declaration of 20 July, from about 47.8 a day to 37.2 ¹. Tanker transits fell 39% over the same stretch. Saudi-linked tanker transits fell 46%, thinning to roughly 7.5 a day once Lloyd's-market war-risk cover for those hulls lapsed on 24 July ². Bab el-Mandeb is the strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and it carries the short leg from Saudi loading terminals to refineries in Italy, Spain and Greece.

The sequence began with fire and ended with paperwork. The Houthis declared the blockade and struck two tankers on 23 July . Underwriters then pulled cover for Saudi-linked vessels, and the transit count collapsed after that, not before it. Saudi Arabia had already stopped sending crude through the strait and pushed the volume north through Suez instead , so the withdrawal hardens a reroute already under way and stacks on top of the per-voyage Suezmax penalty this desk priced last week .

Cover and premium behave differently, which is why 7.5 transits a day should be read as sticky rather than as a spot low. A war-risk rate can be argued down inside a week once the loss record cools, as it was at the Strait of Hormuz through late June. A withdrawal removes the contract for a defined class of vessel, and reinstating it needs an underwriting committee to accept that class again. Owners will not sail an uninsured hull past a declared blockade, and no premium is on offer to change that.

Windward also logged three Chinese-linked supertankers crossing unmolested on 23 and 24 July, and read that as a carve-out from the blockade ³. No party has stated one. Every number above rests on that single assessment; no insurer, broker or Lloyd's primary source was reached to confirm the withdrawal or its scope.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Tankers carrying Saudi Arabian oil normally cross a narrow sea passage called Bab el-Mandeb, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, on their way to refineries in Europe. An armed group called the Houthis, who control part of Yemen, said in July they would attack ships linked to Saudi Arabia, and then struck two tankers. Insurers in London, who provide the war-risk cover ships need before they will sail through a dangerous area, stopped covering Saudi-linked ships from 24 July. Without that cover, owners will not risk sailing the route, so the number of tankers using it dropped by nearly half. Ships are instead taking a longer route around, through the Suez Canal, which costs more and takes longer. The important part to notice: it was not the attacks themselves that emptied the strait. It was insurers deciding, days later, that the risk was no longer one they would price.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Marine war-risk cover for a defined class of hull sits with a small number of London and Scandinavian underwriting syndicates rather than being distributed across the market, so a single committee decision to stop quoting Saudi-linked vessels removes insurability for that whole class in one step, faster than owners can assemble alternative cover.

The Houthi blockade declaration supplied the trigger, but the transit collapse tracks the 24 July cover lapse, not the 23 July strikes; the two events sit four days apart in the data because underwriting decisions run on a committee timetable, not a battlefield one.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Owners of Saudi-linked hulls face an open-ended routing cost via Suez until Lloyd's-market underwriters resume quoting cover for the class, a decision no single event can reliably predict.
Short term · Assessed
Risk
A cover lapse that persists past several weeks risks becoming the default routing pattern regardless of whether the Houthi blockade itself eases, since reinstating a withdrawn class needs a fresh underwriting decision rather than a premium adjustment.
Medium term · Reported
Meaning
The transit collapse shows an insurance market decision can ration a chokepoint as effectively as a physical blockade, without a single additional strike.
Immediate · Assessed

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: During the 1980s Tanker War, Lloyd's of London withdrew standard war-risk cover for vessels transiting the northern Gulf, forcing owners onto a separate, costlier facility and cutting transits for weeks at a stretch regardless of how many tankers Iran or Iraq had actually hit that month.

Counter-parallel: War-risk premiums for Strait of Hormuz transits spiked in 2019 after tanker seizures but were priced back down within weeks once insurers judged the loss record had stabilised; a premium hike, unlike an outright withdrawal, leaves the class of vessel insurable throughout.

Reinsuring a Saudi-linked hull now costs whatever a bespoke facility will quote, if one can be found at all, rather than the posted Lloyd's rate; that gap is uninsurable capacity, not an expensive premium, and it prices some owners out of the route entirely regardless of freight economics.

The reroute through Suez absorbs the diverted volume but at the Suezmax substitution cost this desk has already priced at roughly $2 million a voyage , a structural cost floor under the corridor that a war-risk premium reduction elsewhere cannot remove.

Consensus view: Withdrawn Lloyd's-market war-risk cover, not the 23 July strikes themselves , is the mechanism actually rationing Bab el-Mandeb transits: underwriters price a defined vessel class out of the market, and that decision persists independent of whether further attacks occur.

Counter-view: The 46% fall overstates the pain to Saudi export capacity, since Yanbu has carried the bulk of The Kingdom's seaborne crude since the March bypass built out , leaving the strait closure a shipping-cost problem rather than a volume problem.

Key tension: Whether the reroute through Suez is now the durable routing pattern or a temporary detour that reverses the moment cover returns.

Sources:Hellenic Shipping News

Mentions:Windward →Lloyd's of London →Houthis →Bab al-Mandeb →Saudi Arabia →Yemen →Yanbu →Greece →Mediterranean →Iran →Spain →Tanker War →Red Sea →London →Suez Canal →Iraq →Strait of Hormuz →Italy →

First Reported In

Update #21 · Insurers shut Bab el-Mandeb to Saudi hulls

Hellenic Shipping News· 31 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Houthi blockade cuts Saudi loadings 36%

The 23 July Houthi blockade declaration and tanker strikes triggered the war-risk withdrawal behind the transit collapse Windward quantified on 30 July.

Occurred 23 Jul 2026

Read story →

This Event

Bab el-Mandeb thins to 7.5 tankers a day

The route from Saudi Arabia's western terminals to Mediterranean refineries has thinned on an underwriting decision rather than on a strike, and withdrawn cover reverses far more slowly than a premium.

Led to

Saudi Red Sea diesel loadings collapse

The Bab el-Mandeb transit floor this desk logged 30 July strands the same Red Sea cargoes

Occurred 29 Jul 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Shipping and insurance underwriters

Kpler counted five Hormuz transits on 16 August against 31 the previous weekend, while Windward logged four vessels going AIS-dark for up to a month; underwriters price both the attacks and a sanctions register that names their counterparties in unreadable scanned images. Two trackers now measure only the ships that consent to be seen.

China

China sits at the end of the payment chain the 14 August designation targets: Iran's shadow banking network exists to convert sanctioned oil sales, much of it to Chinese refiners, into usable funds. Beijing has previously refused to recognise OFAC's jurisdiction over its own entities buying Iranian crude, leaving this designation to test compliance rather than change trade.

Qatar

Qatar's foreign ministry denied on 16 August holding any Iranian pilots alive, contradicting Iranian General Mohammad Bagherzadeh's claim that Doha holds three Su-24 aircrew, and said it had recovered only one set of remains. Qatar carries Iran's messages to Washington, and this is a public break with Tehran over a fact only one aircrew inquiry can settle.

Oman

Oman's shipping-map talks, covering monitoring, environment and maritime services, were publicly decoupled from any Hormuz reopening by Iran's own foreign minister on 17 August. Muscat's mediation channel keeps functioning on the narrow file it was given, while the political decision it hoped to unlock stays with Iran's security council.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia separately called the recurrence of tanker attacks on Emirati shipping a dangerous escalation, breaking from the UAE's repeated formula. Riyadh speaking in its own name over an attack on another state's vessels signals it reads the pattern differently from Abu Dhabi's flat statements.

United Arab Emirates

The UAE foreign ministry condemned a third ADNOC-linked tanker attack on 15 August in language identical, word for word, to its statement the day before. Three consecutive strikes on Emirati shipping have not moved Abu Dhabi's public wording by a single adjective.