Iran's foreign minister says a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is close. The tankers moving through it are still being hit.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described an Oman-brokered arrangement as "very close" on Friday, according to Al Jazeera, while attaching a condition that keeps the outcome open: a full reopening, he said, depends on the United States honoring commitments in a June memorandum of understanding that Iran says Washington has already violated [1]. That single condition is the gap between a framework on paper and open water.
Inside Tehran, officials are not describing one process. Araghchi points to the Oman channel. The spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Mohebbi, said the reopening has "its own specific mechanism" and is independent of the Oman talks, casting the military track as separate from the diplomatic one [1]. Hassan Qashqavi, spokesman for the parliament's security committee, said the framework itself is agreed and is now waiting on approval "from higher levels" [1]. The three accounts do not contradict each other outright, yet they describe a deal that is simultaneously nearly done, running on a parallel military mechanism, and still awaiting a sign-off no one has named.
President Masoud Pezeshkian added the political marker. He said he would "strongly defend" the June memorandum, the same document Iran accuses the US of breaching, and rejected calls from hardliners for him to resign over the negotiations [1]. His defense of the June text places the disputed agreement at the center of Iran's terms rather than to the side of them.
Washington's position, as reported, is the counterpart to all of this: Iran frames the June memorandum as violated by the United States, which makes what June settled the unresolved core of the talks. The two capitals are not arguing over a new document so much as over whether an old one still holds. Al Jazeera's account presents Iran's characterization; the US reading of the same commitments is what the reopening now turns on [1].
The mechanics under discussion are specific. The interim arrangement is envisioned to last 60 days and to be extendable, and it would split traffic into two lanes: a northern lane through Iranian waters for inbound vessels, and a southern lane through Omani waters for outbound ones [1]. That geography is the deal's tell. Routing inbound ships through Iranian waters puts Tehran astride the traffic it would be agreeing to let pass.
While the framework is negotiated, the shooting has not stopped. A vessel operated by ADNOC, the United Arab Emirates' state oil company, was targeted by missile again on Saturday, the UAE Foreign Ministry said. The ministry reported no casualties and called the strike "piracy" [1]. A tanker taking fire during the very week a reopening is called "very close" is the clearest measure of how far apart those two facts remain.
The number riding on the outcome sits in the oil price. Brent crude traded near 83 dollars a barrel as the deliberations continued [1]. Roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes through Hormuz, which is why a strait that is neither closed nor reliably open registers as a premium paid by refiners and, eventually, by drivers who never see the gulf.
What a reopened strait is worth, and to whom, depends on who writes its terms. The tolls, the lanes, the fate of the US blockade: each is decided by the side that fixes the framework rather than the side that accepts one. For now the framework is unfixed, the June memorandum is disputed, and an ADNOC crew is the latest to learn that "very close" is not the same as safe passage.
