Only 14 vessels... WINNING!

Only 14 vessels crossed Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, maritime intelligence firm says

By Issy Ronald

Only 14 vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, maritime intelligence firm Kpler said, marking a slight rise from the weekend but still nowhere near pre-war levels even a day after US President Donald Trump claimed the waterway is “open.”

Despite Trump’s repeated claims that the US controls the strait, most vessels used the Iranian-approved route that the US has warned ships against taking.

While traffic through the strait slightly increased, those “higher volumes have not translated into normalization,” Kpler added. Eleven of the 14 vessels followed the Iranian-approved route, and none used the traditional route through the center of the strait that most vessels followed before the war, Kpler said.

Trump doubled down yesterday on his claim that the US has gained control over the Strait of Hormuz.

“They don’t have control. We have total control. We own it, and at some point, maybe they’ll do something, and then they get blown away,” Trump told reporters. “Right now, we’re in a very good position.”

That echoed his comments on Monday in which he claimed that the US has swept the waterway for mines, meaning it is now “open.”

But shipping traffic has not increased substantially, and it remains well below the roughly 120 vessels that navigated the waterway daily before the war.

And reopening the strait is becoming more pressing, as the world burns through its oil stockpiles at a rapid clip, the International Energy Agency has warned.