Ever Lovely<\/a>, the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, halted an effort to evacuate hundreds of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\nHarry Vafias, chief executive of Stealth Gas, a shipping company, said on Saturday that of his three vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf for more than three months, one was able to exit the Persian Gulf in recent days. But the other two are still stuck and it is too difficult for them to exit at this time. He said the \u201csituation in Hormuz seems to be deteriorating once more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran has in recent weeks tried to establish formal control over shipping in the strait, something it did not have before. Iran has been demanding that vessel operators gain its permission before going through \u2014 and it has threatened ships that have not done so. Many vessels have worked out arrangements with Iran.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Sunday that the country was solely responsible for managing the strait under the preliminary agreement it signed with the United States, and warned against \u201cinterference\u201d in managing routes through the waterway.<\/p>\n
Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told \u201cFox News Sunday\u201d that the United States would not allow Iran to \u201cillegally control an international waterway.\u201d<\/p>\n
United States Central Command is helping ships go through the strait, on routes close to Oman\u2019s coast line, but it is not clear how much military protection it is offering. Central Command said it had assisted the passage of over 500 vessels since early May.<\/p>\n
After the attack Saturday on the tanker, Kiku, Central Command said, \u201cCommercial vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz continue. U.S. forces remain vigilant, lethal and ready.\u201d And on Sunday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which tracks security at sea, said that \u201cU.S.-assisted commercial transits continued uninterrupted despite the elevated threat environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Iran\u2019s first strike last week, ship traffic through the waterway had been increasing. On Wednesday, 73 ships went through and 54 on Thursday, according to data from Kpler, a maritime analysis firm. The attacks did not appear to cause a complete halt to ship traffic. At least 34 vessels transited on Friday, and at least 10 vessels on Saturday, but that count was incomplete and was expected to rise, according to Kpler.<\/p>\n
The traffic numbers from earlier last week were higher than the minuscule daily totals that occurred during the war but still well below the roughly 130 ships that transited daily before the conflict. For oil and gas flows to return to normal, and bring relief to countries that are dependent on Middle East oil, ship traffic has to keep rising.<\/p>\n
There have been essentially three types of traffic going through the strait: Iranian ships and those vessels that have obtained permission from Iran; the vessels transiting with U.S. assistance; and the ships that were part of the evacuation organized by the International Maritime Organization.<\/p>\n
Arsenio Dominguez, the secretary general of the I.M.O., said on Friday that 115 vessels, with about 2,500 crew members, had been evacuated since Tuesday. Of the total, 51 exited on Thursday and 16 on Friday.<\/p>\n
The I.M.O. has said that the ship attacked on Thursday had not been part of its evacuation, and Mr. Dominguez said he needed \u201cadditional information\u201d to determine whether the ship was part of the Central Command effort. A spokesman declined to say whether the Ever Lovely, which was close to Oman when it was hit, had been part of its initiative.Some experts on the strait said that the Central Command operation was not doing enough to restore high ship traffic through the strait, and that the United States military might have to do more.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to have to upscale those efforts,\u201d said Martin Navias, the co-author of \u201cTanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
But any big escalation may cause ship traffic to slow to a trickle again.<\/p>\n
The United Nations evacuation effort appealed to ship operators who did not want to deal with Iran and who did not want to take the risk of going through with U.S. assistance and potentially become the target of an Iranian strike, shipping experts said.<\/p>\n
After the Iranian and U.S. strikes, such ship operators will now most likely avoid the strait until conditions appear safer, which could delay a return to prewar traffic.<\/p>\n
\u201cRisks will remain high for shipping,\u201d said Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. \u201cIran is unwilling to halt its attacks on ships and threats \u2014 and this will continue requiring a response from the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A renewal of strikes by the forces of Iran and the United States is threatening the nascent recovery…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[5483,15389,3657,34,1418,39,1417,101,103,7582],"class_list":["post-182186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-persian-gulf","tag-defense-and-military-forces","tag-freight-cargo","tag-international-maritime-organization","tag-iran","tag-oil-petroleum-and-gasoline","tag-persian-gulf","tag-ships-and-shipping","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-united-states-central-command","tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116831209558691332","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}