Hormuz ship traffic highest since war began, maritime tracking firm says

Iran is closing the Strait of Hormuz as retaliation to Israel launching strikes on Lebanon.

PARIS - At least 37 commodity carriers transited the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, a record level since the start of the Middle East war in late February, according to data from the maritime tracking firm Kpler.

AXSMarine, another shipping data provider which tracks transits by commercial vessels including container ships, counted 42 crossings on Monday -- also a record.

Five empty liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers were among the ships crossing on Monday, according to Kpler.

“This may be one of the clearest signs so far of a tentative normalization in traffic,” Mihail Todorov of AXSMarine told AFP.

Monday’s crossings equalled about a third of peacetime traffic through the strait, which normally sees around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports pass through.

Overall commodities traffic through the strait -- which includes tankers carrying oil and LNG plus dry bulk cargoes such as fertilizers -- has increased slightly after Washington and Tehran reached an agreement last week to end the war.

Before the June 14 agreement, less than 10 commodity vessels went through the strait per day since the passage was closed by Iran on March 1 in retaliation against U.S. and Israeli strikes.

Since June 15, the average has risen to 21, and reached 27 over the last five days.

LNG operators had previously been very cautious about transiting the strait.

Whether Iran will administer the vital passage remains one of the key questions in the talks set for the next two months.

“The Strait of Hormuz will never return to its pre-war conditions and will be administered by the Islamic Republic of Iran, in accordance with international law,” Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said during negotiations in Switzerland, state media reported Tuesday.

Iran announced Saturday that it had closed the strait again in response to Irsael’s attacks on Lebanon.

On Monday, the United States said it was temporarily lifting sanctions on Iran to let it produce, sell and deliver crude oil and related products through Aug. 21.