Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, said the Strait of Hormuz remains closed despite the temporary transit agreement reached with Oman, and that Washington must return to its commitments under an earlier memorandum before there can be a full reopening, Al Jazeera's live coverage reports.
We reported the Oman talks yesterday, and this is the clarification they needed.
A corridor is not an opening
Yesterday's framework covered a temporary joint navigation corridor, mine clearance, and arrangements to follow. Read against today's statement, that describes a narrow, supervised channel rather than the resumption of normal traffic, and Tehran is making sure nobody mistakes one for the other.
This is a negotiating position stated plainly: the corridor is available, the strait is not, and the difference is the leverage.
The other claim in the same story
President Donald Trump said mines have been cleared from international waters, and warned that ships laying new ones will be "destroyed".
Those two statements do not sit together comfortably. One government says the waterway is closed; the other says the obstacles in the international portion of it are gone. They may both be accurate about different areas, since a strait includes territorial waters as well as international ones, and clearance is done in sections. They may also simply be competing accounts.
We cannot verify either. What we can say is that if mines had been fully cleared and the route were open, there would be no need for a temporary corridor to be negotiated through Oman.
What the warning implies
A threat to destroy vessels laying mines is a statement about rules of engagement, and it describes a situation in which mine-laying is still considered a live possibility rather than a past event.
What we could not establish
We could not establish which sections of the strait have been cleared, how many ships are transiting, what the corridor's terms are, what commitments Iran says Washington has abandoned, or whether commercial insurers have resumed cover. This account comes from live blog entries rather than a full report, and we verified it from a single publication.
