TEL AVIV — Seven oil tankers caught fire or were damaged in the Strait of Hormuz overnight after being hit by Iran or striking naval mines, Tehran said Thursday, a markedly high number as tensions rise over concerns about a return to all-out war.
With days before a close election in Israel in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could lose power, and before next month’s U.S. midterm election in which war-linked high prices have sparked voter anger, there are concerns that U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran could resume.
“Netanyahu wants to attack Iran, that’s not even a question,” Danny Citrinowicz, a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and a former Iran specialist in Israel’s military and intelligence services, told The Associated Press.
He accused Israel of rushing into another round with Iran without revamping its strategy. A clear Netanyahu victory in the Oct. 27 election means an attack is almost guaranteed, he said.
Main opposition candidates are likely to focus on domestic issues first, but Citrinowicz said he believed the region is on the way toward “another kinetic escalation.”
Iran repeats threat to attack U.S. bases in the region
Iranian state television reported the claims about the latest attacks on ships, which the AP couldn’t independently confirm. The report cited the Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, which again threatened to strike U.S. military bases in the region if the U.S. keeps helping to guide commercial ships through the strait.
The report didn’t mention casualties. Iran still asserts control over the waterway, a central point of leverage in any talks with the U.S. over the war.
October has had the most reported attacks on commercial shipping since March in the war’s opening weeks, according to a British military monitor, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations. UKMTO didn’t report the latest attacks, but it has noted new reluctance by some shippers to report incidents.
Oil producers have found ways to keep crude flowing, experts say, but at a mounting cost.
Tankers continue moving through Strait of Hormuz despite attacks
Oil tankers are still moving oil through the strait under U.S. military protection despite the recent upsurge in attacks, according to shipping data and analysis company Lloyd’s List Intelligence.
Tanker operators willing to risk the voyage have been shuttling oil from Gulf producers through the strait at night with their location systems and mobile phones turned off using a U.S.-protected lane near the coast of Oman. Those tankers transfer oil to other tankers waiting in the Gulf of Oman for shipment to customers in Asia.
Those “active Gulf operators show little sign of retreating” despite 28 attacks on ships in October, the highest since the start of the war, Lloyd’s said in an online webinar Thursday.
The so-called “dark shuttle” overseen by U.S. Central Command has helped return oil shipments from the Gulf at roughly prewar levels, but at high costs in time, money and sailors’ lives. Spot charter rates for tankers have soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, while the ship-to-ship transfers can take several days.
U.N. urges U.S. and Iran to return to diplomacy to end conflict, reopen strait
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said no commercial ships should be attacked and called for diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran to reopen the strait.
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“For the sake of the people of the region and for the broader world, we need to see that waterway reopen, and we need to see tensions go down,” he told reporters Thursday.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Wednesday said Tehran remains open to diplomacy, but is ready to defend itself.
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Iran has warned that it learned important military lessons from the war that began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Feb. 28, indicating in recent days that it could expand targets to include infrastructure such as undersea cables and data centers.
The United States, for its part, is sending more military assets to the region, including a third aircraft carrier and thousands of troops, to join the largest force of American warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades.
Mediators, meanwhile, have been trying to bring Washington and Tehran back to formal talks.
Iran still promotes its latest proposal to end the war and fully open the strait within a week if the U.S. meets several conditions, including ending the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports. It echoes conditions in the deal that fell apart within days of both sides signing it in June.
U.S. President Donald Trump rejected the latest proposal last month, but both sides acknowledged that indirect discussions have continued.
The stakes are even higher if all-out war resumes
A return to full fighting would again endanger civilians throughout the region and complicate global deliveries of oil, natural gas and related products like fertilizer from the region and likely bring another spike in prices.
The head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, this week acknowledged that the Islamic Republic will suffer under a prolonged U.S. blockade. But economic pain and strategic collapse are not the same thing, he added, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency.
Now the conflict has widened with the recent surge in fighting between Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi kingdom backs a coalition of forces with Yemen’s internationally recognized government that is fighting the rebels.
The Houthis’ repeated deadly attacks on airports and other facilities inside Saudi Arabia have pressured the close U.S. ally, which has sought military aid.
The escalation also has threatened a crucial shipping corridor, the Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, the president of Saudi oil company Aramco, whose sites have been targeted by the Houthis, said the amount of oil moving through a pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz has increased threefold in light of the global energy crisis.
The East-West pipeline’s capacity has surged from 2 million to 7 million barrels each day, Amin Nasser said in an interview with Saudi-owned television Al Arabiya Business. He said the company has been using drones to assess any damage to the pipeline and help with firefighting.
