Iran is due to meet Gulf states in Oman on Monday 14 September 2026 on safe passage for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, with an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson telling Bloomberg that the talks cover a shipping route and nothing wider1. The session had not convened when this briefing went out on Sunday 13 September.
Muscat has held this file all year. Abbas Araghchi led a delegation there on 18 July for Oman-hosted talks narrowly focused on reopening the strait, and Iran and Oman had been in continuous consultations on a bilateral transit mechanism since 18 May. A narrow scope lets the channel survive: a conversation about a shipping lane can proceed while the nuclear file, the sanctions programme and the tanker exchanges stay where they are.
Iran arrives at a safe-passage meeting with an unplotted exclusion area of its own still standing. Tehran declared a restricted maritime zone running from Chabahar into the Gulf of Oman on 9 September and published no coordinates for it, so the water a master must avoid cannot be drawn on a chart. One crew member died when a projectile hit a merchant ship off Hengam Island, inside the same strait, on the morning before the meeting2.
