Oil tankers at anchor. Photo: Gregory J Kingsley, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
At least 25 seafarers have been killed in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the war between the United States, Israel and Iran broke out in February, the United Nations said, as shipping through the world's most important oil chokepoint has fallen by about two-thirds and insurers refuse to cover the voyage at all.
Khaled Khiari, the UN assistant secretary-general for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, gave the figures during a briefing to the UN Security Council on Friday. The toll covers the period up to November 11.
The UN's International Maritime Organization tracked 136 security incidents involving vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Middle East between March 1 and November 11. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, the British naval body that monitors shipping in the region, has logged 163 conflict-related maritime incidents since the war began on February 28, including 141 reports of damage to vessels.
Shipping down 65 percent
Traffic through the strait remains approximately 65 percent below pre-war levels, according to UKMTO's latest weekly report. In the week ending November 11, at least seven tankers were attacked, and the agency rates the threat level in the region as severe.
Iran has warned vessels that they must receive its authorisation to cross the waterway during the conflict, and has repeatedly attacked ships it accuses of taking what it calls an "illegal route", often a southern corridor of the strait. Iranian officials have said at least a dozen ships have been hit over the last two weeks for using that route.
Iran's navy said on Saturday that a tanker had struck a sea mine and caught fire east of the strait, marking the fourth such incident over the past 24 hours, and warned other vessels against entering the area. Iran's military did not provide the names or origins of the vessels involved, and the incidents could not be independently verified.
The United States military says it has cleared the strait's main routes of mines and that the waterway is open for commercial shipping. But the numbers tell a different story: most commercial traffic has simply stopped coming.
"No insurer willing to take any risk"
Even ships willing to sail cannot get cover. Oscar Seikaly, chief executive of NSI Insurance Group, a US-based insurance brokerage, told Al Jazeera that "none of the insurers we work with are willing to take any risks at this time" to cover a transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
"No one is willing to take on any risk right now, especially with the current standstill," Seikaly said. "The situation could flare up at any moment. Coverage is unavailable until the situation is cleared."
Without insurance, most commercial owners will not send their ships through the strait at all, whatever navies say about the route being open. The result is a de facto closure of a waterway that normally carries about a fifth of the world's oil supplies, enforced not by a blockade but by the insurance market's refusal to underwrite the risk.
A costly, unpredictable and unsafe sea
Khiari told the Security Council that "the present maritime arrangements in the Middle East remain costly, unpredictable, and unsafe", and warned that disruptions to shipping "continue to have significant global economic consequences, driving up energy, transport and insurance costs, fuelling inflation and threatening food security amid severely constrained fertiliser shipments."
Iran's chief negotiator, Mohammad Ghalibaf, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that the Strait of Hormuz would never return to its pre-war status quo, and would only reopen after the United States accepts Iran's demands. The United States, for its part, has kept its naval blockade of Iranian ports in place, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington sees no need for further military strikes because the economic pressure on Tehran is working.
The war began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks on US bases in Gulf states and moved to restrict shipping through the strait, while the Houthis in Yemen have opened a second front against Saudi Arabia.
Nine months in, the human toll at sea keeps rising, the ships keep staying away, and the insurers have made their judgment: until the situation is cleared, the Strait of Hormuz is not a commercial waterway.
Sources: Al Jazeera; United Nations; United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations.