Of the 10.23 million barrels a day of Gulf crude that crossed the Strait of Hormuz in October, roughly 42 percent went to China and 13 percent to India. The estimates come from Muyu Xu, a senior crude analyst at Kpler, quoted in The Guardian. The waterway those numbers describe is neither closed nor open. It is rationed, and the ration is political.
That is the central fact of Strait of Hormuz oil in the fifth month since fighting resumed. Nobody has sealed the strait outright. Access is sold, granted and denied according to whose friend a shipowner's government happens to be.
A narrow door with a doorman
Iran's account of how this works came from Amir Hayat Moqaddam, deputy chair of the parliamentary national security committee, who told the Iranian Students' News Agency this week that vessels from four countries may pass: China, India, Qatar and Iraq. By his telling, everyone benefits. Indian and Chinese ships pay transit fees. Qatari ships go free. India sent medicine; China offered political backing.
Take that at face value and the strait looks like a toll road with a guest list. Oman, which borders the strait's southern side, sees it differently. Its foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, has a longer-term proposal for running the waterway in line with the law of the sea, under which shippers would pay for services rendered and not for the privilege of passing. The difference between a service charge and a toll decides whether the strait remains an international route or becomes an instrument of one coastal state.
Nobody outside the negotiating rooms can say how much of the 10.23 million barrels moved under paid exemptions. The tanker flows do show who is most exposed. Beijing and New Delhi together took about 55 percent of October's crude, and both are, for now, customers of the arrangement they might prefer to see replaced. Any change in who pays, or how much, lands on them first.
A week of fire on the water
The traffic is thin and dangerous. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a Western military intelligence body, counted at least 11 ships attacked in and around the strait in the week ending November 6. Three sank. Its weekly tally showed 170 outbound and 155 inbound transits, about 65 percent below levels before the conflict. Since the fighting picked up again in early July, the same body has recorded 88 strikes by projectiles on vessels, and it cautions that most incidents are never reported. Anyone tempted to treat that figure as a ceiling should think twice.
Al Jazeera, reporting from Tehran, says ships that leave their transponders switched on mostly use the Iranian-controlled lane to the north. A good number of others slip along the southern approach by Oman with tracking disabled, carrying oil out unseen. That is where the mines come in. Iran's naval force says two tankers that took an unauthorised route in the eastern sector hit mines and caught fire, and accuses them of crossing with American military support. Washington says the mines have been cleared. Both statements can't be true, and the burning hulls are the nearest thing to evidence either way.
The fighting ashore continues. Friday night brought two strikes on Iran's Qeshm island, part of several weeks of American attacks on air defences and launch sites there. President Donald Trump described them as "minor strikes." Tehran claims it downed another American drone, and the Revolutionary Guard says it has now destroyed 16 aircraft of the MQ-1 type since the war began. If transits stay 65 percent down, next quarter's cargo tallies will carry the cost.
The Qatari sequence
The diplomacy that matters most is happening in Doha, and it turns on order of operations. Qatar, the lead mediator, wants UN nuclear inspectors inside Iran's bombed sites, including those holding the stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The design asks for little up front. Iran would not have to promise to ship the stockpile abroad, and other options, such as down-blending the uranium to a lower enrichment level, remain available.
As the Guardian lays out the bargain, the first step falls to Washington: it would end its naval blockade of Iran in the strait immediately and free up part of roughly $8bn in frozen Iranian assets. Tehran, for its part, would let International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into its damaged facilities, building on a Cairo agreement of September 2025 that was later abandoned. A day later, Iran would reopen the strait along a route it has already settled with Oman, and the two countries would register it jointly with the International Maritime Organisation.
On paper that is tidy. In practice every step invites a quarrel about who moves first. Tehran has attached more conditions to reopening: an end to the war in Lebanon, withdrawal of American forces from the Iranian coastline, relief from some sanctions and war reparations. Araghchi, the foreign minister, said on Saturday he had spoken to 12 counterparts in 48 hours, among them his Omani, Qatari, Saudi and Pakistani opposite numbers, and had pressed seven demands for reopening the strait along with a call for regional security arrangements free of outside powers. Security chief Mohsen Rezaei reportedly repeated the same terms to Vladimir Putin.
A draft memorandum of understanding, meanwhile, floated a $300bn reconstruction and development fund for Iran. Nobody has said who would pay. A number that size with no named donor reads less like a financing plan than a measure of how far apart the parties' imaginations sit, and I wouldn't expect it to survive contact with a Western treasury.
The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, spoke with Trump on Friday. His office would not disclose what was said, only that he stressed dialogue and diplomacy to prevent further escalation.
Why the inspectors are the sticking point
The oil flows make the strait urgent. The inspections make the deal fragile. Iran says it has lost faith in Rafael Grossi, head of the IAEA, whom it accuses of betraying the non-proliferation treaty by declining to criticise American bombing of its nuclear sites. Underneath the grievance sits a practical fear: that whatever inspectors learn will be passed to Washington and Israel as targeting data.
For a government that has been bombed, whatever one thinks of the larger war, the fear is not irrational. It also means the inspection leg of the Qatari plan asks Tehran to trust the one institution it currently trusts least. Hossein Mohebbi, the Guard's spokesman, said this weekend that the IRGC would prepare to build a bomb if the state changed its nuclear doctrine. That is not the language of flexibility.
Washington's weaker hand
The American side is not at full strength either. Trump is still weighing another assault on Iranian nuclear sites, but the Guardian notes his threats carry less weight inside Iran after Vice-President JD Vance attributed the Republican rout in the midterms partly to the conflict itself, and not merely to what it has done to prices for consumers. Iran, by that account, is in a triumphalist mood.
That cuts two ways. A president who has just taken an electoral beating may want a deal that reopens the strait and calms fuel prices. Tehran, sensing that, may ask for more rather than less. The Revolutionary Guard has already said the range cap on its ballistic missiles, kept for years at about 2,000 kilometres to reassure Europe, is gone. "This limitation has been lifted for us," Mohebbi told reporters. The announcement followed an order from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei for a response without restraint to any fresh threat from Israel or the United States.
What to watch
First, whether Iran agrees to any inspector visit, since the rest of the Qatari sequence depends on it. Second, whether Oman and Iran file their shared route with the IMO, which would give a wartime workaround legal standing. Third, and grimmest, the next UKMTO weekly count. If transits stay near 65 percent below normal and ship losses keep mounting, Beijing and New Delhi will stop asking whether they like the toll arrangement and start asking how long they can rely on it.