Two vessels belonging to ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company), the Emirati state producer, came under attack while crossing the strait of Hormuz on the night of Thursday 13 August. Nobody was hurt. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) foreign ministry, in a statement carried by the state news agency WAM, called it "an act of piracy by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps" and a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2817 on freedom of navigation1. Bahrain condemned the attack separately. Tehran has claimed nothing.
Five days earlier Abu Dhabi said an Iranian missile had targeted a single ADNOC ship and stopped there, leaving the attacker unnamed and the vessel unidentified. Thursday's statement names the force, cites a Security Council instrument and reaches for a word with specific legal weight. Piracy under the law of the sea means violence committed for private ends, and a state's armed force does not meet that test, which is why the choice reads as political rather than legal.
What the word does buy Abu Dhabi is a category every shipowner and underwriter already prices. A firm chartering a tanker this week reads a Gulf government saying the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) is firing on that government's own ships inside the waterway, and the most exposed hull is the one carrying no Iranian tie to trade on. That reading sits underneath the week's transit collapse rather than beside it.
Abu Dhabi's account remains the only one on the record. No independent confirmation of the attack exists, no vessel names have been released, and the UAE has not said what damage the two ships took.
