Iran sinks two more ships in Strait of Hormuz as war enters ninth month

Two commercial ships sank in the Strait of Hormuz this week after a surge in Iranian attacks on merchant shipping, the first vessels lost in the waterway since March and a sign that the eight-month-old war between Iran, the United States and Israel is intensifying rather than winding down.

The Singapore-flagged container ship GFS Pride was struck on Tuesday while transiting the strait. It caught fire and later sank; its crew was evacuated and no injuries were reported, according to a Washington Post report on the sinkings. A second vessel, an unnamed bulk carrier that had been hit by an Iranian attack the previous month, went down on Wednesday, the International Maritime Organization said. A third ship, the GFS Giselle, sustained hull damage in Tuesday's attacks but reached a safe anchorage under its own power, Singapore's port authority reported.

Iran's navy, meanwhile, announced it was expanding surveillance of shipping east of the strait, deploying new units across the Sea of Oman and the Arabian Sea and warning vessels to keep their transponders on and coordinate passage with Iranian forces or risk being targeted.

The numbers

The scale of the past two weeks sets it apart even within a war that has disrupted Gulf shipping for eight months. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency recorded 15 attacks on vessels in the strait between October 6 and 14, 11 of them in the final four days of that stretch. The commodity data firm Kpler counted ten tankers struck between September 28 and October 4, with another hit on October 5. Taken together, more than 14 vessels have been struck in the waterway over the past two weeks alone.

The disruption to traffic has been severe. Kpler data showed roughly 20.8 million barrels of oil and fuel passing through the strait on October 8, but only 2.9 million barrels on October 11 — the lowest daily volume of the month and far below the prewar daily average of 17.1 million barrels. Brent crude rose 0.8 percent to $106.58 a barrel in early trading after the latest sinkings, while US benchmark West Texas Intermediate settled at $94.14.

Those figures sit on top of a grim cumulative toll. By late August, six months into the conflict, the International Maritime Organization said it had verified at least 70 attacks on international shipping in the region, which had killed 19 seafarers and left as many as 400 vessels carrying roughly 6,000 crew unable to depart the Persian Gulf safely. The UAE's foreign ministry, in an April statement protesting the Security Council's inaction, separately put the toll at that point at 21 direct attacks since the war began, more than ten crew members killed and roughly 20,000 seafarers stranded across the wider region. Before this week, the last ship sunk in the strait was a UAE-flagged tugboat attacked in March while trying to assist a disabled vessel.

How the strait became a battlefield

The war dates to February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. Tehran responded by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne crude oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes, and the US answered with a naval blockade of Iranian ports. The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution in March condemning Iran's attacks and threats against shipping and affirming the right of states to defend their vessels, passing 13 to 0 with China and Russia abstaining. In May, the US launched "Project Freedom," a naval escort operation to guide stranded commercial ships through the strait, after American forces had sunk a flotilla of Iranian minelayers it said were mining the waterway.

Fighting has ebbed and flared since. A ceasefire reached earlier in the conflict broke down by midsummer, and the IMO Council adopted a further resolution in July reaffirming the protection of international shipping lanes. Iran has set out seven conditions it says must be met in full before it will reopen the strait and end the war; it maintains that Washington has accepted some of them but that its overall response has been "insufficient." An Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran shifted to its current tactics roughly ten days before this week's sinkings, and said one aim was to put pressure on the Trump administration ahead of November's US midterm elections.

Who is caught in the crossfire

The immediate victims are the roughly 125 large commercial vessels that, before the war, transited the strait daily, along with their crews. Seafarers aboard affected ships have faced monthslong confinement in Gulf waters, elevated insurance costs and, in dozens of documented cases, death or injury. Shipping companies have had to pay higher crew bonuses and war-risk premiums, and some analysts believe Gulf governments have quietly paid Iran for safe transit, even as Tehran and Gulf states each deny any such arrangement.

Gulf oil producers, chiefly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have seen repeated strikes on their state-linked tankers; Qatar's foreign ministry has condemned earlier Iranian strikes on UAE-flagged vessels as violations of the safety of international navigation, according to the UAE's state news agency. Beyond the Gulf, the volatility has rippled into global energy and fertilizer markets, feeding the kind of price swings that briefly pushed Brent above $106 a barrel this week. US and allied naval forces operating in the strait, now reinforced to protect the higher volume of traffic Washington has pushed through in recent months, are also directly exposed to Iranian drone, missile and small-boat attacks.

Competing narratives

Iran and the United States continue to offer starkly different accounts of who controls the waterway and who is responsible for this week's losses. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said the bulk carrier that sank Wednesday had struck a naval mine; a US military official countered that Iran had lied about the cause and that the ship was likely hit by a missile. The maritime security firm Marisks said it had found no independent evidence that a mine caused the GFS Pride's loss either.

Mohsen Rezaei, identified by Iranian state media as the country's security chief, accused US and allied forces of using small vessels to covertly transfer oil to larger tankers in defiance of Iran's restrictions, and said Iranian forces had targeted the practice directly.

"You are smuggling, but the strait is under Iran's control, and we manage it," Rezaei said.

US Central Command has repeatedly rejected such claims, saying American and regional partner forces, not Iran, control the waterway, and that it has helped move tens of millions of barrels of crude through the strait in recent days alone. Chris Featherstone, a political scientist at the University of York, said the latest wave of attacks underscores the strait's continued fragility and that Iran appears to be using them to raise pressure on the Trump administration, which he said has not moved to re-engage in negotiations or seek help from potential intermediaries such as Qatar and Pakistan.

What happens next

There is little sign of an imminent de-escalation. The Joint Maritime Information Center, the US Navy-led body that tracks threats in the region, continues to rate the danger in the strait as "severe," its second-highest classification, citing ongoing drone overflights, surveillance and radio hailing of commercial vessels alongside direct attacks. Featherstone said US allies in the Gulf are likely to press Washington for greater regional stability, but with no active talks and the US midterm elections roughly three weeks away, Iranian officials have suggested the current tempo of attacks is unlikely to ease before polling day.

The International Maritime Organization's Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, has called repeatedly for "renewed political will and cooperation" among member states and the shipping industry to restore free passage through the strait, warning that the economic damage from continued disruption is being felt well beyond the Gulf. For now, insurers, shipowners and the thousands of seafarers still working Gulf routes are bracing for further losses, with no ceasefire, mediation effort or Security Council action currently underway to reverse the trend.