For four months the blockade shot at every flag but Iran's. That ended at Kharg

The last US strike on an Iranian hull in this record was 8 May; the eight since hit Gambian, Palauan and Panamanian ships. Tehran says Saturday's hit an Iranian tanker at its loading terminal.

Published 2026-09-05 · analysis

For four months the American blockade of Iran shot at everybody's tankers except Iran's. Tehran's wire says that ended on Saturday morning, with an Iranian oil tanker hit six nautical miles off Kharg Island — inside the Persian Gulf, not in the strait and not on the outbound leg through the Gulf of Oman, but at the terminal where Iranian crude is loaded. If the report holds, the blockade has stopped trying to catch Iranian oil in transit and started hitting it before it leaves.

This site's incident record holds 20 US actions against merchant shipping. Nine touched an Iranian hull, and all nine fall between early April and 8 May: six ships intercepted and taken off Malaysia, off India, in the Arabian Sea and in the Persian Gulf, then three Iranian tankers hit from the air off Bandar-e Jask — the Hasna on 6 May, the Sevda and the Sea Star III two days later. Every one of the eight US strikes since, from 29 May to the Vela Nova on 11 August, hit a ship flying somebody else's flag: The Gambia, Palau, Guinea-Bissau, Curaçao, Mozambique, Panama, and in two cases a registration the record itself calls false. That is 120 days without an Iranian hull.

The flags were the mechanism, not an accident of it. Six of those eight strikes were in the Gulf of Oman — outside the Gulf, on the way out, after the cargo was aboard and the ship had become a question of whose oil it was. Kharg Island appears exactly once in the rest of this record, and as a destination rather than a place: on 2 June the US put a Hellfire into the engine room of the Lexie, unladen, while it was heading there to load. The line has moved from the approach to the berth.

It lands about 24 hours after Iran's oil minister told Mehr that crude exports ran without interruption through the forty-day war, naval blockade included. Reflagging is what makes that claim possible: a barrel that loads at Kharg and sails under a Curaçao flag is a ship the blockade has to identify before it can act on it, and identification is what the last four months of ordnance were spent on. A missile at the berth skips the step. It is also a wider target set than Washington claimed at Kharg in March, when the president's own announcement of that raid was specific that it had obliterated every military target on the island. A tanker at a loading berth is not one.

What changes is which number to watch. Yesterday this site found that the only Hormuz news Brent still trades is an American airstrike on Iranian ground in or beside the strait: ten closes, a median move of 6.3%. Kharg is neither in nor beside the strait, and the strait's transit count cannot answer the question a strike there asks, which is whether Iranian oil gets loaded at all. Brent's last close in this record is $96.02 on 1 September, and a Saturday strike cannot reach a close before Monday. That close is the first test of whether the channel oil still trades is American ordnance or the strait.

† The Kharg strike is carried by Iranian state media only — Mehr at 08:23Z and Tasnim at 08:57Z on 5 September — with no US confirmation in this record, so the attribution is Tehran's. The incident file behind the flag counts runs 28 February to 14 August, so a US strike on an Iranian hull in the three weeks since would not yet appear in it. An Iranian hull means an incident whose target the record names as Iranian-owned or Iranian-flagged.

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