Iran to announce new restricted shipping zone near Strait of Hormuz

Iran will announce a new “restricted zone” for shipping outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days, high-ranking security official Mohsen Rezaei has said.

The US resumed strikes on Iranian targets last week, saying they were in response to Tehran hitting commercial ships in the key waterway. The Islamic Republic maintains that no vessel can pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for the shipment of some 20% of global oil, without its permission. Iran retaliated with a missile and drone barrage against US military facilities in the Gulf, while also firing at American warships, including an aircraft carrier.

In a televised interview on Sunday, Rezaei, who is the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran plans to place even wider curbs on shipping in the region.

The restricted area “will begin from the US Navy’s blockade line and extend into parts of the Persian Gulf,” stretching toward several key ports, he said.

“Any vessel entering this new zone will be placed on a sanctions list,” which will have consequences for its insurance and future passage through the strait, the security official explained.

Rezaei insisted that the Strait of Hormuz remains “completely closed and under the control of the armed forces” of Iran, describing US President Donald Trump’s claims that it’s open as a “big lie.”

More than a hundred vessels passed through the waterway on a daily basis before the US-Israeli attack on Iran in late February, but now the number has reduced to only seven or eight per day, the official said. Those vessels are transporting essential goods for the Islamic Republic, he added.

“The Americans are trying to smuggle five to six vessels through at great expense, but these ships are usually struck,” Rezaei stressed.

Iran isn’t sinking those ships because they are carrying oil and doing so would harm the environment, he stressed.

On Saturday, the US attacked three Iranian commercial vessels as part of its blockade of Tehran’s ports, with one of them, the crude oil tanker M/T Kylo, sinking in the Gulf of Oman the next day.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned in a post on X that Washington could target the Iranian oil tanker fleet in the Middle East or in the Indo-Pacific region. “It’s simple: if Iran shoots at US ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers,” he wrote.

Iranian Parliament speaker and top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned on Sunday that further aggressive actions by the US will be met with “faster, heavier and more painful” retaliation by Tehran.

“The Americans have surely understood that the era of proportionate responses has come to an end and our recent strikes against aggressor bases was only a start,” Ghalibaf said.