Maritime Security and Safety
Iran Shuts Strait of Hormuz to All Shipping as US Launches New Wave of Strikes
Iran Shuts Strait of Hormuz to All Shipping as US Launches New Wave of Strikes
IRGC declares waterway “closed until further notice”; oil tankers and commercial vessels warned they will be fired upon; global energy markets reel as Nigeria’s crude export revenues and import supply chains face mounting pressure
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has formally declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to all maritime traffic, including oil tankers and commercial vessels, following a renewed round of American airstrikes deep inside Iranian territory — the latest violent turn in a conflict that has paralysed one of the world’s most consequential shipping corridors since February 2026.
The IRGC announced the closure citing what it described as the United States’ “repeated violations” of an April ceasefire, declaring the strait “closed until further notice” and warning that all traffic — oil tankers and commercial ships alike — would be targeted.
The escalation followed the US Central Command’s announcement of renewed strikes on “multiple targets” inside Iran, which the Pentagon said were carried out at President Donald Trump’s direction “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression.” Iranian state media reported explosions across strategic coastal and island locations. Strikes hit Qeshm Island and the port cities of Bandar Abbas and Sirik along the strait.
Drone Strikes on Gulf Bases; Two Tankers Hit
Iran’s IRGC claimed drone strikes on Bahrain’s Sheikh Isa airbase and Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem and Ahmad Al-Jaber airbases. In the waterway itself, two oil tankers that reportedly attempted passage through the Strait of Hormuz were struck by Iranian forces, which accused them of attempting to “illegally pass through” the blocked channel.
The attacks deepened a tit-for-tat exchange between Tehran and Washington. The latest round of hostilities came a day after the two sides traded strikes following the downing of a US Apache helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz.
A Waterway the World Cannot Replace
The Strait of Hormuz sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, separating Iran to the north from Oman to the south — and there is no alternative route for Gulf petroleum exports. In peacetime, roughly 20 percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the strait, making it the only route to open sea for Gulf oil producers.
World Trade Organisation data points to a 95 percent reduction in ships carrying crude oil to and from Persian Gulf ports and a 99 percent reduction in LNG-carrying vessels since the conflict began. The UAE’s state-owned oil company has estimated that full flows through Hormuz may not resume until 2027, even if a peace agreement is reached quickly.
Oil and food prices have climbed globally since the strait’s initial closure in March. Traffic through the waterway has remained limited ever since, driving up both energy and food prices worldwide.
Diplomacy Stalling; Trump Raises Stakes
On the diplomatic front, progress has been painfully slow. Indirect talks between Washington and Tehran aimed at securing an interim agreement remain stuck on core issues, with Iran demanding the release of frozen assets and sanctions relief, while complications from Israel’s intensifying campaign in Lebanon continue to cloud negotiations.
Trump accused Iran of stalling negotiations and threatened to strike power plants and bridges if Tehran refused to sign an agreement. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian pushed back, calling threats against civilian infrastructure “not a show of strength but a sign of desperation.”
A conditional ceasefire extended through talks remains nominally in place, but shipping levels through the strait remain extremely low. The US has also imposed a counter-blockade on vessels seeking to access Iranian ports.
Nigeria Watch: What This Means for Nigerian Maritime Stakeholders
The continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz carries serious downstream consequences for Nigeria, even though the conflict is geographically distant from West African waters.
Crude oil revenue: Nigeria is a major crude oil exporter, and elevated global oil prices — a direct result of Hormuz supply disruptions — have provided short-term revenue uplift for the Federation Account. However, sustained global price volatility makes forward budget planning difficult for the Federal Ministry of Finance and NNPCL’s trading desks. Any sudden diplomatic resolution that reopens the strait could see prices correct sharply downward, exposing Nigeria’s revenue assumptions.
Refined petroleum and LNG imports: Nigeria remains a net importer of refined petroleum products, and the near-total freeze on Gulf LNG shipments — with a 99 percent reduction in LNG traffic through Hormuz — is reverberating across global gas markets. Domestic energy pricing and the cost of shipping fuel imports into Lagos, Warri, and Port Harcourt terminals will continue to feel this pressure.
War risk insurance and freight rates: Nigerian shipowners, freight forwarders, and terminal operators at Apapa, Tin Can Island, Lekki, and Onne should note that war risk insurance premiums across the Gulf of Guinea and wider Atlantic remain elevated as underwriters price in global instability. Nigerian importers of Gulf-origin goods — machinery, chemicals, fertilisers — are absorbing higher freight charges as carriers re-route around the Persian Gulf and re-price their risk.
Tanker availability: The effective removal of hundreds of tankers from active circulation in the Persian Gulf is tightening global vessel supply. Nigerian crude liftings on VLCC and Suezmax tonnage may face scheduling pressures as charterers compete for available hulls. NPA terminal operators and NNPCL’s crude trading arm will need to monitor tanker market tightness closely in the weeks ahead.
Strategic lesson for Nigerian maritime policy: This crisis — like the Red Sea/Houthi disruptions before it — reinforces the imperative for Nigeria to build genuine cabotage fleet capacity, reduce dependence on foreign-flagged vessels for domestic cargo, and accelerate the Coastal and Inland Shipping (Cabbottage) Act enforcement regime. Nigeria cannot insulate itself from every global shock, but a stronger domestic fleet and deeper port infrastructure reduce vulnerability.
The Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy and NIMASA should seize this moment to make that case to the National Assembly with fresh urgency.
Waterways News monitors the Strait of Hormuz crisis and its implications for Nigerian ports, shipping, and blue economy policy. Further updates will follow as the situation develops.
FIVE DEAD, 41 MISSING AS FIRE GUTS INDONESIAN FERRY CARRYING 271
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
At least five people are dead and 41 others remain missing after a passenger ferry caught fire off Indonesia’s Madura Island on Sunday, triggering a major multi-agency search and rescue operation involving naval and civilian vessels.
The Mutiara Sentosa 2, sailing the roughly 40-hour Surabaya to Makassar route with 271 people on board, including 232 passengers and 39 crew members, caught fire between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time in waters off Sumenep regency, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said. The vessel was also reportedly carrying 181 vehicles, mostly trucks, and an excavator.
About an hour after the blaze started, ferry operator PT Atosim Lampung Pelayaran alerted the Surabaya Search and Rescue Office, after the vessel’s captain radioed a distress report saying the ship was ablaze near the northern tip of Madura Island. Contact with the vessel was then lost.
By 9:45 a.m., rescuers had pinpointed the ferry’s location, roughly 19 nautical miles north of Buruan Sapudi Island, after reaching the nearby cargo ship Meratus Project 3. That vessel, however, could not approach the burning ferry closely because it was carrying a flammable load. A tugboat and another passing vessel became the first responders, beginning evacuations shortly before 10 a.m., before more ships joined the operation.
By Sunday afternoon, several nearby vessels had rescued 225 passengers and crew and recovered five bodies, with 41 people still unaccounted for. Basarnas dispatched a rescue vessel from Surabaya, though officials estimated a six-hour transit time to the scene, and a rigid inflatable boat sent from the Sumenep rescue post was forced to turn back due to rough seas and high waves. An Indonesian naval warship has since joined the search.
The cause of the fire has not been established and remains under investigation. It is the second major Indonesian maritime distress incident in as many months. Last month, rescuers searched for survivors after the KM Nurul Salsa suffered engine failure and sank, with five survivors, including a seven-year-old girl, recovered days later.
NIGERIA WATCH
Indonesia’s tragedy off Madura should sound familiar to anyone tracking Nigeria’s own inland and coastal waterways. Strip away the geography and the pattern is the same one that recurs on the Niger, the Benue and the Niger Delta creeks every rainy season. Overloaded or ill-equipped vessels, delayed distress reporting, and rescue assets that arrive too late or cannot reach the casualty at all.
The detail that should trouble Nigerian regulators most is the nearby cargo ship that could not assist the burning ferry because it was itself carrying flammable cargo. This is a reminder that firefighting capability, not just headcount, is the real test of vessel safety. NIMASA and NIWA have made real strides on the Seafarer Discharge Book digitization and the CVFF portal, but neither agency has articulated a clear standard for onboard fire-suppression systems on domestic ferries, particularly those plying the country’s inland waterways that operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON know well.
There is also a lesson for NIWA and LASWA in the response timeline. Indonesian rescuers, despite dispatching a navy warship and multiple agency assets, still needed roughly six hours to reach the vessel, and one rescue boat had to turn back in rough seas. Nigeria’s own record on Benue and Niger Delta boat accidents shows the same gap between a distress call and an effective response, a gap that NIWA’s enforcement push and the LASWA-Interferry Ferry Safety Development Programme are meant to close, but which will keep costing lives until vessel-side fire and lifesaving equipment compliance is treated with the same urgency as overloading and life-jacket enforcement.
Maritime Security and Safety
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
Beneath the surface calm of a fragile Middle East ceasefire, a covert maritime operation is doing what diplomacy has not been able to do. It is keeping oil flowing out of the world’s most contested waterway. Tankers with their transponders deliberately switched off are meeting far offshore, transferring millions of barrels ship-to-ship, and disappearing back into commercial shipping lanes before regulators, insurers, or belligerents can react.
This is not a new tactic. It is the same “dark fleet” playbook sanctioned Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan crude have relied on for years. What has changed is who is now using it, and why a legitimate, US-escorted oil trade has been forced to borrow the tradecraft of sanctions evasion just to survive.
THE NUMBERS TELL A STORY OF FRAGILE NORMALITY
Satellite imagery over the Omani port of Sohar recorded at least seven tanker-pair transfers in a single day this week, several involving supertanker-class vessels capable of moving a combined 8 million barrels. Two weeks earlier, at the height of renewed US-Iran hostilities, that same stretch of water saw only two such transfers. The swing illustrates how tightly oil-market stability in 2026 is now tethered not to production levels, but to a handful of shipowners’ daily risk calculus.
Even with the rebound, flows remain a fraction of the roughly 20 million barrels a day that once transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war. US officials now put total Gulf exit volumes at around 13 million barrels daily, split roughly evenly between the strait itself and bypass pipelines built precisely to reduce dependence on Hormuz. American forces say they have personally escorted close to 500 million barrels out of the strait since May, a scale of military involvement in commercial shipping rarely seen outside declared war.
WHAT THIS MEANS BEYOND THE GULF
For Nigeria and other non-Gulf producers, a Hormuz shuttle trade that works, however imperfectly, is a double-edged development. It has so far kept a full-blown price shock at bay, with Brent oscillating between $80 and $100 rather than spiking uncontrollably, which shields Nigeria’s import-heavy fuel supply chain and naira-denominated energy costs from the worst-case scenario. But it also means Gulf producers are adapting fast enough to defend their market share even under bombardment, a resilience that could blunt any window Nigerian and West African crude grades might otherwise have gained as buyers hedged away from Hormuz-dependent barrels.
There is also a governance dimension worth flagging for Nigerian maritime observers. The same AIS-dark, ship-to-ship transfer tactics now legitimising emergency oil flows out of the Gulf are structurally identical to the techniques long used for illegal bunkering and crude theft in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea. When a G7 navy escorts and effectively normalises transponder-dark transfers as sound commercial practice under conflict conditions, it complicates the international case for treating the same behaviour as inherently criminal in West African waters, an inconsistency Nigerian regulators and NIMASA may eventually have to reckon with.
A MARKET RUNNING ON DELAYED CARGOES, NOT CONFIDENCE
Perhaps the clearest sign of how strained the system remains: buyers of Emirati crude, including cargoes tied to ADNOC tenders, are only now receiving shipments that were due weeks ago, some having incurred demurrage costs on ships hired to collect oil that never showed up on schedule. ADNOC’s shipping unit has itself had to book a tanker for a Sohar ship-to-ship pickup, effectively routing its own state oil company’s cargo through the same shadow logistics used to dodge attacks.
The picture that emerges is not one of a market that has stabilised, but of a market that has adapted to instability, one satellite pass at a time.
Maritime Security and Safety
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Rescuers are still combing waters near a contested reef system in the South China Sea after a Vietnamese-flagged cargo vessel went down over the weekend, leaving 17 crew members unaccounted for.
Of the 62 people who were aboard the vessel, the Khoi Nguyen 18, when it ran into difficulty, 45 have so far been pulled to safety, Vietnamese officials confirmed.
According to Chinese state media, the roughly 70-metre freighter got into trouble close to Yongshu Reef, also called Fiery Cross Reef, off China’s Hainan province. A Chinese rescue vessel, the Nanhai Jiu 115, first picked up what appeared to be a distress flare from the stricken ship on Saturday evening, shortly before 6:30pm local time.
The search-and-rescue effort has drawn in a sizeable multinational response: six Chinese vessels, a rescue helicopter, and a Vietnamese ship have all joined the operation, state news agency Xinhua reported.
A flashpoint waterway
The sinking adds to safety concerns in one of the world’s most disputed maritime zones. China claims sovereignty over the vast majority of the South China Sea — a position an international tribunal rejected in a landmark 2016 ruling brought by the Philippines.
Among the most contentious areas are the Spratly Islands (known in China as the Nansha Islands), where Beijing has built airstrips and fortified artificial islands. China’s claims overlap with those of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan, making the region a persistent source of regional friction and, as this incident shows, a challenging one for maritime emergency response.
Search efforts were ongoing at the time of filing.
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