Rubio says Iran has lost the Strait of Hormuz; Tehran says it will close more of it

Speaking alongside Greece’s foreign minister at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens on Wednesday, Marco Rubio said “The Straits of Hormuz are open” and that Iran had “lost complete control” of the waterway. He described Iran’s economy as “in total and complete freefall”, called the sanctions “crippling” and said the economy was “about to reach a place few countries in the world have been”. Iranians, he said, are “much less powerful militarily” than at the start of the war. Rubio framed the administration’s benchmark narrowly — that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon — and said every dollar reaching the “radical Shia clerics” is spent on Hezbollah and Hamas. The remarks were carried from the same press conference by the Times of Israel, Malay Mail, Free Malaysia Today and CBS News.

Tehran’s answer arrived the same day. A senior Iranian military figure, unnamed in CBS News’s live coverage, said Iran retains “full control” of the strait and would soon block what he called illegal shipping routes through it. Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammad Akrami-Nia said separately that Iran’s forces are better prepared than before to confront a renewed attack and raised the prospect of preemptive strikes on US bases; his comments were made to a semi-official Iranian agency and are paraphrased, not quoted, in the reporting available. Neither assertion is independently verified. The two positions were set side by side in a single piece by the Korean outlet Asia Business Daily, under the Iranian framing: full control of the strait.

The numbers that exist cut against the word “open”. The maritime tracking firm Windward logged five inbound and eight outbound transits of Hormuz on 4 October — thirteen vessels in a day, eleven of them using the northern corridor and one running dark with its transponder off. The same dataset recorded 167 vessels affected by GPS jamming in the Gulf that day, 103% above the seven-day average, generating 841 false ship-to-ship meeting records. Prices tell a parallel story. The US Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, released 6 October, put Brent’s September spot average at $114 a barrel, $23 above August, and raised its fourth-quarter forecast to $105 — $14 above the previous month’s outlook — on the assumption that Middle East flows remain constrained. Brent was trading at $101.53 early on Thursday, up 1.33% on the day, with WTI at $89.39, according to Reuters figures.

Assessment: Both governments are describing the same water and neither is describing it accurately for the record. Rubio needs the strait to be open because an open strait means the campaign worked; Tehran needs it to be closable because that is the only leverage it has left at the Qatari table. The useful test is not rhetoric but freight: thirteen transits in a day, clusters of ships loitering rather than sailing, and a fourth-quarter Brent forecast revised up $14 in a month are not the signature of a normalised waterway. Treat the EIA revision as the most reliable single indicator on the desk — it is a forecast made by people with no stake in either claim. Al Jazeera’s question of whether Iran is quietly charging transit fees remains a question, not a finding.