A second tanker is mined in Hormuz, and Central Command says almost all shipping still clears the strait

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy said on Saturday that two oil tankers had caught fire after hitting naval mines while crossing the Strait of Hormuz¹. The Guards’ navy announced that the second vessel, which it called a “violating” supertanker, had exploded after striking a mine². Iranian state media said both tankers were carrying about 2 million barrels of crude oil, according to the official news agency IRNA³. An earlier mined supertanker was reported burning in the same waterway a day before¹.

The Guards said the second tanker had disabled its tracking equipment at the US military’s instigation before it hit the mine⁴. That account comes from the Guards themselves and is not corroborated elsewhere in these reports. The Guards’ navy also repeated a warning to all maritime traffic that the strait “remains closed in accordance with Iran’s sovereign decisions”⁵. Turkey’s foreign minister called for free navigation through the waterway⁴.

Why it matters to investors

The United States disputes the closure. US Central Command said that about 97% of the ships that have sought to transit the Strait of Hormuz have done so successfully without being hit⁶. Central Command also said the strait remains open for navigation, citing its latest operational data while acknowledging that threats to shipping lanes persist across the wider region⁹. About 400 merchant ships transited the strait over the past week, on Central Command’s figures⁸.

Both claims are official statements rather than independent measurements, and they describe the same water. Al Jazeera reported that dozens of ships were attacked in or near the strait during October as Iran and the United States competed to assert control of it⁷. For owners, insurers and refiners, the gap between a declared closure and a published transit rate is the whole question: it sets war-risk premiums, charter rates and the discount applied to Gulf barrels.

What to watch

Whether commercial operators price Central Command’s transit data or the Guards’ closure declaration as the operative fact^5,6. Maritime reports also cited a tanker struck by a rocket-propelled grenade off the Saudi coast, which suggests the risk is not confined to the strait itself⁸. If mining continues while transit volumes hold, the market is being asked to treat a contested chokepoint as functioning; if volumes fall towards the Guards’ claim, the physical disruption becomes real rather than rhetorical^7,9.