Tehran calls Washington’s answer on Hormuz insufficient and stops replying altogether

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a former IRGC commander, said on Sunday that the US reply to Iran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz fell short. “About two weeks ago, we communicated seven conditions to the Americans, stating explicitly that until these conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz will not be opened to them and no negotiations will take place,” he said, per The National. “The Americans have now responded. While they have accepted some of our conditions, others remain unresolved.” The National reports he said Washington had approached Tehran through Pakistan, Qatar and Iraq over the past two months. Reuters, carried by Business Recorder, reports Iran presented a proposal at the UN General Assembly under which normal passage would resume within seven days if the conditions were met. The conditions themselves have never been published. AP reports a senior Iranian official called the US response “insufficient” and warned of attacks on regional data centres and cables if fighting intensifies.

The waterway itself produced at least three incidents in a day, with incompatible authorship. UKMTO said it received a report from a tanker transiting the strait that it was struck by an “unidentified projectile,” with all crew safe and no environmental impact, per Middle East Eye; the Jerusalem Post renders the same advisory as an outbound tanker hit on the port side. CENTCOM announced early Sunday that it had disabled the Panama-flagged Ocean Molica in the Gulf of Oman with a precision munition from a fighter jet after the crew attempted to bypass the US naval blockade on Iranian ports — a US claim about a US action, not independently verified. The IRGC, via Iranian state media, said a tanker exploded after striking a naval mine; CBS’s live file separately carries the IRGC saying it struck a gas tanker. Gulf News, via an aggregator, reports two Indian seafarers missing after a drone strike.

The traffic data remains the hardest number on the desk and the least well provenanced. The tracker straits.live, counting Day 224 since closure, reports four vessels transited on 4 October against a normal baseline it puts at roughly 85 a day, and attributes the four-transit figure to IMF PortWatch; the baseline and the judgement that war-risk insurance has closed the strait are the tracker’s own. Pointing the other way, United Against Nuclear Iran’s 5 October shipping update describes large clusters of loitering vessels on both sides but says the coalition’s maritime information centre reported an increase in open transits after an MoU was signed, with 1,006 vessels transiting as of 3 October — a cumulative figure over an unstated window, from an advocacy organisation.

Assessment: Rezaei has now described the seven conditions twice in public without listing one of them, and neither Washington nor the Qatari channel has leaked the text. That silence is the negotiation: an unpublished list lets Tehran claim partial American acceptance without anyone being able to price what was conceded, and lets Washington deny having conceded anything. Whoever publishes the list first sets the terms of the next fortnight. The maritime file is the more revealing tell. In a single day the IRGC claimed an attack on a gas tanker and attributed another tanker’s destruction to a mine — a weapon with no author. Those are not contradictory by accident; they are two different audiences being addressed.