Tehran’s mine claims remain unconfirmed, but the rerouting around Hormuz now shows up in Cairo’s books

The Public Relations Office of the IRGC Navy announced on Friday, through Iranian state media, that two oil tankers caught fire after striking sea mines — one east of the Strait of Hormuz, one inside it — both allegedly transiting what the IRGC calls an “unauthorized route” with US military support. It was the second consecutive day of such claims: Iranian media reported five tankers and a tugboat on Thursday. AFP reported that no maritime authority had confirmed any of them. CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper said on 25 October that the main shipping lanes remain clear of Iranian mines, and CENTCOM has since stated that more than 3,000 commercial vessels transited the waterway under US escort over six months. The one incident with an official body behind it is narrower: UKMTO reported that the master of a tanker transiting the strait reported an explosion at the port-side waterline sixteen nautical miles east of Khasab, Oman, with all crew safe. Separately, an operator confirmed a seafarer killed after an explosion north of Madinat ash Shamal, Qatar, attributed to two unidentified projectiles. Three events, three evidentiary classes, one running total in the headlines.

Whatever is or is not happening in the strait, the rerouting it has produced is being counted by institutions with ledgers. Suez Canal Authority chairman Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie announced on 5 November that October traffic reached 1,490 vessels against 1,128 a year earlier, net tonnage 88 million tons against 47 million, and revenue $724m against $373m — a 94 per cent rise. The composition matters more than the headline: average vessel size rose roughly 42 per cent, to about 59,000 net tons, while revenue per net ton rose only 3.7 per cent. Price did almost nothing; the largest ships came back first, and they came back because the alternative routes got worse. Rabie credited “the return of most global shipping lines to transiting the canal again,” and spoke of improvement “despite the geopolitical challenges in the region.” Egypt’s canal is not recovering from the Red Sea crisis so much as collecting from a different one. Baghdad is doing the same arithmetic in reverse: exports through the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line have reached 500,000 barrels a day, of which roughly 200,000 is Basra crude trucked north by tanker lorry into northern infrastructure to avoid Hormuz entirely.

The political clock running above all of this is Washington’s. Trump had said he would not attack Iran before the 3 November midterms; that constraint has lapsed. He met his national security advisers on Thursday — the first Iran discussion since the vote, per Axios, citing two US officials — with three options reported on the table: new strikes, continued economic pressure, or a deal requiring significant US concessions. On Friday he confirmed limited strikes on an Iranian air defence system; Iranian state media reported two explosions at Suza on Qeshm Island. Asked about it, he said: “We do minor strikes.” The oil market has already voted. Brent traded above $110 on Monday, settled at $104.77 that day after a 7.6 per cent fall, and closed Friday at $98.32 — a weekly decline of more than 16 per cent, after October gains of more than 10 per cent priced in post-election escalation. Bob McNally of Rapidan Energy told CNBC he puts the probability of fighting resuming at 80 per cent, with both benchmarks back above $100.

Assessment: Neither of the two parties counting tankers is a witness. Tehran’s mine claims assert a regulatory authority over the strait without claiming an attack — damage inflicted on ships that broke rules Iran alone writes. CENTCOM’s counter-claim of clear lanes and 3,000 escorted transits is equally interested, and we could not locate the primary release behind it. Treat UKMTO’s incident list, not either statement, as the spine of any tally. Distrust three further figures in circulation this weekend: the straits.live reading of two Hormuz transits against an 85-a-day baseline is a specialist tracker’s rendering of IMF PortWatch data and dates to 25 October, eleven days stale; the 500,000 bpd Ceyhan number rests on an unnamed North Oil Company source, and Kurdistan24 says plainly that no official has confirmed it; and a single Cairo outlet reports Rabie raising the annual revenue target to $6.6bn, a figure absent from every other account of the same briefing. The Suez numbers are the hardest thing on the page because they are an official announcement that can be checked next month.