Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained throttled on Saturday, after naval skirmishes between U.S. and Iranian forces in recent days heightened tensions in the vital shipping route.<\/p>\n
For weeks, the narrow passage between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea has been choked by two competing blockades<\/a> enforced by each side in the conflict. About 1,600 ships<\/a> are bottled up in the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n Since April 13, the U.S. Navy has intercepted and turned around 58 commercial ships that were either leaving or trying to enter Iranian ports, and American forces have \u201cdisabled\u201d four other ships that did not comply with American orders, Central Command announced on Saturday<\/a>.<\/p>\n In public statements, the United States and Iran continued to trade threats on Saturday. Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards Navy said that any attack on Iranian vessels would be met with a \u201cheavy assault\u201d on American ships and other U.S. targets in the region. President Trump posted a meme<\/a> of Iranian warships that had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean.<\/p>\n Data from MarineTraffic, a global ship-tracking firm, indicates that at least six cargo ships have crossed the Strait of Hormuz since Wednesday, but no tankers. Tracking by the London Stock Exchange Group shows that the number of ships passing through the narrows each day has decreased since Monday, from an already-low level.<\/p>\n Those intelligence firms may provide an incomplete picture, however, because vessels sometimes fake or shut off<\/a> their location signals. Still, the data they have collected generally shows how traffic has plunged in recent days, even relative to some other periods during the cease-fire, which started on April 7.<\/p>\n On Thursday, there was a new round of skirmishes in the strait. The United States said<\/a> it struck military sites in Iran after Iran attacked three American destroyers. On Friday, the U.S. military said that it had fired on two Iranian-flagged oil tankers, disabling them as they tried to reach an Iranian port.<\/p>\n Iran, for its part, said it had attacked the American warships on Thursday in retaliation for what it described as American cease-fire violations, including strikes on the country\u2019s southern coast. Iranian forces kept up their efforts on Friday, seizing a Chinese-owned oil tanker in the strait<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Saturday, the Mehr news agency, affiliated with the Iran\u2019s security forces, quoted a regional governor who said that an overnight American attack had struck six vessels in the country\u2019s Khasab port, leaving six people missing. There was no American confirmation of that attack.<\/p>\n