At his weekly Tehran press conference on 18 May 2026, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said Iran and Oman were 'in continuous consultations' on a bilateral Hormuz transit mechanism, after an expert-level technical meeting in Muscat the previous week, Euronews reported1. Baghaei's weekly briefing is the primary on-the-record channel for Iran's diplomatic positions; this one extended a bilateral channel Tehran had only previously disclosed in the context of guiding Indian vessels through Hormuz minefields.
Oman shares administration of the strait of Hormuz with Iran under a 1968 bilateral agreement signed before UNCLOS was drafted. That historical priority matters for the legal architecture: a co-signed Iran-Oman transit system cannot be dismissed as a unilateral Iranian imposition the way the PGSA-only mechanism can, and it directly confronts the UNCLOS Article 38 freedom-of-navigation foundation the 26-nation coalition has been resting on.
The Muscat track also reframes Oman's diplomatic posture. Muscat has historically been the back-channel host for US-Iran talks rather than a co-administrator of pressure. Drafting a transit mechanism with Tehran rather than mediating between Tehran and Washington places Oman closer to Iran's institutional architecture than to the coalition's. If a written agreement emerges, the freedom-of-navigation argument coalition planners have been making becomes a treaty dispute between two sovereigns who share the strait, not a corridor-opening operation against an isolated obstructor. The shift is the kind of legal repositioning that, once signed, is hard to reverse with hardware.
