Twenty-four Indian seafarers were aboard the MT Settebello when an American aircraft put precision munitions into its engine room on the night of June 9. Twenty-one were pulled from the water. The other three were listed as missing. On Thursday, India's shipping minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, confirmed what their families had presumably feared: the bodies had been recovered and identified. Three men dead on a Palau-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, in a war that is not theirs.
That phrase, "deeply unfortunate," was how Sonowal described the deaths in a post on X, as the BBC reported, adding that the remains would be returned to India shortly. It is the language of diplomacy under strain. Behind it sits a harder fact. This is the second tanker carrying Indian crew that US forces have struck in the same waters in a single week, and the Indian government has now summoned the deputy head of the American mission in Delhi to register its objection.
The blockade and the men caught in it
The killing of the three sailors is a consequence of a policy decision the US made on April 13, when Central Command began enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. The trigger, according to Washington's account, was Tehran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and gas moves. Cut off Iran's customers by sea, the thinking went, and you squeeze the government in Tehran without committing to a wider ground war.
The arithmetic of that campaign is now public. Centcom says it has disabled eight vessels and turned away another 134 since the blockade began. Most of those redirections, presumably, ended without bloodshed. The Settebello did not. US Central Command said an aircraft fired into the ship's engine room "after the crew repeatedly failed to comply" with American instructions, casting the strike as the predictable end of a series of warnings. The vessel, the military said, had been attempting to carry oil out of Iran in violation of the blockade.
Here is where the official story and the human one pull apart. A blockade is a blunt instrument, and the men working the engine rooms and decks of these tankers are, in nearly every case, employees with no say over the cargo or the route. India is the single largest supplier of merchant seafarers to the global commercial fleet, which is why Indian nationals keep turning up on the casualty lists. The Settebello had 24 Indians aboard. So did the Marivex, another Palau-flagged tanker that US forces struck on Monday, also in the Gulf of Oman, also after Centcom said it ignored directions. All 24 of the Marivex crew were rescued by the Omani navy, Indian authorities said. The Settebello's crew was not so lucky.
A union's accusation
Manoj Yadav, general secretary of the Forward Seamen's Union of India, told the BBC his organisation had begun contacting the families of the dead to break the news. He went further in remarks to The Economic Times, and his point deserves attention. He does not accept that the US was unaware of who was aboard those tankers. Crew manifests are not secret. If a ship refused to follow orders, Yadav argued, the alternative to firing on it was to detain it, with its crew alive.
That is the question the strike leaves hanging, and it is not a rhetorical one. There is a long-standing principle, however imperfectly observed, that you do not treat civilian merchant sailors as combatants. A blockade gives a belligerent the legal right to stop and inspect, even to seize, ships running it. The right to sink one with its crew aboard is a far narrower thing. Centcom's own statement describes a sequence of ignored warnings, which is the framing you would expect from a military arguing it acted within the rules of engagement. Whether repeated non-compliance justifies lethal force against a tanker full of South Asian deckhands is precisely the sort of thing that international lawyers will argue over for years, long after the news cycle has moved elsewhere.
New Delhi's public line has been consistent and pointed: it wants the attacks on merchant vessels and on the civilian facilities of the region to end. It is a position that costs India little to state and a great deal to enforce, given that the country holds few cards it can actually play against either Washington or Tehran while their war is under way.
A war nobody seems able to stop
The deaths on the Settebello are a small, terrible footnote to a far larger collapse. The conflict began on February 28, when, by the BBC's account, US and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader. Iran answered with attacks on Israel and on US-allied Gulf states. By March, Lebanon had been pulled in. A ceasefire was patched together in April, but it has been fraying for weeks, and this week it came close to tearing entirely.
What tipped the latest escalation, according to the Guardian's live coverage, was an incident in which Iranian forces brought down an American helicopter near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Washington responded with a second consecutive day of airstrikes across southern Iran, the most serious breach of the truce so far. Tehran hit back, targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. In Bahrain, authorities said an 11-year-old girl was hurt in a drone attack. Iran's newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority then declared the Strait of Hormuz "closed until further notice," blaming American aggression, according to the Guardian. The Revolutionary Guard had already said the waterway was shut to all shipping. Centcom rejected that, insisting commercial vessels were still moving through.
Both of those claims cannot be fully true at once, which tells you something about how reliable information is right now in one of the busiest stretches of water on earth. President Trump, for his part, threatened on Wednesday to strike Iran hard, complaining that Tehran was dragging out peace talks and, in his words, treating Americans like "suckers."
What to watch
And yet, beneath the strikes, the diplomacy has not entirely stopped. CNN reported, citing a diplomatic source, that talks survived the overnight bombing. Reuters went further, saying negotiators were working on a mechanism to release frozen Iranian funds, with Tehran reportedly seeking somewhere between six and twelve billion dollars. So the two governments are shooting at each other and bargaining at the same time, which is not as unusual in the history of war as it sounds.
The thing to watch is the Strait of Hormuz itself, and the ships still inside it. If Iran's closure order holds and the US keeps enforcing its blockade by fire, the Settebello will not be the last tanker hit, and Indian crews, who staff a disproportionate share of the world's merchant marine, will keep paying for a quarrel between Washington and Tehran. The families of three men in India are now waiting for bodies to come home. The wider question, of how many more crews are sailing into the same trap, has no answer yet.