With the war grinding toward its sixth month and diplomacy stalled, Qatar’s prime minister is heading to Tehran to try to reopen talks after Washington and Iran exchanged fresh recriminations over the US pledge to tighten economic pressure on the Islamic republic by sanctioning its trade partners.
Qatar, a Gulf neighbour of Iran and a US ally, has operated as a back-channel negotiator between the warring sides and took on a direct role in brokering the June ceasefire that briefly brought a halt to the fighting.
That truce has left much of the battlefield quiet, but it has not produced a diplomatic breakthrough.
At the centre of the impasse is control of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic corridor for global oil supplies that Tehran has treated as leverage.
A memorandum of understanding fell apart in part because the parties could not bridge differences over the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies moved before the war began on 28 February.
Even as the dispute drags on, the guns have mostly fallen silent. The US military’s Central Command has not reported any attacks on Iran for nearly a month.
In Washington, the emphasis now appears to be shifting toward financial pressure, with the US announcing plans to sever Iran from its trading partners through increased sanctions.
The energy impact is already visible. Oil flows through Hormuz have slid to a three-month low, with only five million barrels per day transiting on Monday, according to the latest ship-tracking data.
Before the war, roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude oil passed through the strait.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani
In Tehran, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said yesterday that Iran and Oman had agreed on how to share the waterway and its revenues. A senior Iranian source later said the two countries were still working through the details of any agreement.
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Iran’s military has been badly weakened by aerial bombardment earlier in the war that severely diminished its conventional forces. Still, Tehran has retained enough missile and drone capability to strike Gulf neighbours that host US military bases and to disrupt oil tankers in the strait.
The United Nations’ International Maritime Organization has recorded 70 incidents in the Strait of Hormuz since 28 February, resulting in 19 seafarers killed.
Thousands of others have died — mostly in Iran and Lebanon — since the US and Israel attacked Iran with stated goals that included denying Iran a nuclear weapon, helping Iranians topple their government, and destroying Iran’s missile programme.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani will use his trip to Tehran to discuss the continuation of Qatar’s mediation efforts and other developments in the region, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on X that Sheikh Mohammed would also raise freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the need to return to the status quo that existed before 28 February, while discussing with Iranian officials ways to “de-escalate tensions and create the conditions conducive to dialogue.”
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Before the conflict, the international waterway was open to free navigation. Since then, Iran has held tightly to its control of the strait as both a bargaining chip and a source of revenue, seeking to levy a commission on ships — an approach the US has opposed.
“An agreement with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz has not been finalised,” the senior Iranian source told Reuters, adding that talks were continuing on the details of an accord.
The account appeared to clash with comments from Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who said Iran and Oman had “reached results that are acceptable to both sides” on control of the strait and its revenues.
Mr Mohebbi said the strait would remain shut unless the US met Tehran’s conditions under the interim ceasefire — or memorandum of understanding — the two sides signed in June before it unravelled.
Those demands include an end to the US blockade on Iranian ports, compensation and the removal of sanctions.
Iran and Oman have been in intermittent talks for weeks over how to manage traffic through the strait.
Meanwhile, Tehran and Washington have each sought to assert authority over the channel, imposing separate blockades.
