Iran's Hormuz conditions have left the security council for the Supreme Leader

Twenty-seven hours after Tehran's wire reported Washington had rejected the seven-day plan, the foreign minister moved the terms for reopening the strait from the council that set them to the Leader.

Published 2026-09-29 · analysis

Iran's seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz never started its clock, and the conditions that would start it have changed hands. At 12:03Z on Tuesday the foreign minister said the waterway can reopen only once conditions set by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution are fulfilled. Across the 292 Iranian statements this site reads, back to 18 February, that is the first time the reopening terms have been attributed to the Supreme Leader. Every earlier attribution that named a body named the Supreme National Security Council.

The handover took 55 hours and it straddled a rejection. Araghchi published the seven-day plan at 06:26Z on Saturday. At 05:25Z on Sunday, from the UN General Assembly sidelines, he said reopening depended on conditions set by the SNSC - the council, named explicitly. At 06:38Z on Monday he was still keeping the door open to the plan. Two and a half hours later Tehran's own wire reported that Washington had rejected the seven-day truce. The council became the Leader 27 hours after that, in a sentence that opens by saying Iran's positions have not changed.

Who owns the terms is the whole finding, because the council was a counterparty and a movable one. Its secretary changed hands in August, mid-list. Its bill went from five conditions on 8 August to seven on 23 September, the only increase in this record. A body that revises its price inside seven weeks is a body with something to negotiate over. The Leader's office is not that, and on the evidence here it is not neutral either: Mojtaba Khamenei has spoken about the strait exactly once in his own voice in this file, on 12 March, when he said the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz should be used and that it must stay shut. The conditions have moved from the office that prices the closure to the one voice on record that called it an asset.

Two things this is not. It is not a decree - the record is a single tier-2 wire summary, and a Tasnim paraphrase is not the Leader's office speaking, which is why the sentence is worth watching rather than banking. And it is not something a price has refereed. The official Brent closes still end at 114.89 on 22 September, a week behind the wire, and Iranian words are a null in this data regardless: days carrying them move crude 0.88 times as much as quiet days, a permutation p of 0.67, which is to say no difference at all. The water has not voted either. Hormuz ran 3.1 transits a day on the seven-day average through Sunday, against a pre-crisis median of 84 on the same measure.

Sunday's piece left one question open - whether the seven-day week would ever begin. It has not, and the reason now has an address. The trigger is no longer held by the council whose number everyone has been counting, so neither the condition count nor the clock is the thing to watch. What to watch is whether the Leader's office speaks about the strait a second time. Until it does, the most concrete reopening offer of the crisis is gated on a man with one statement on the subject in seven months, and that statement was to keep the strait closed.

† Statement counts, timestamps and attributions are from iran_statements.json, which runs to 14:21Z on 29 September. The words-versus-quiet comparison is the words class in words_deeds.json. Transit averages are from timeline.json, which ends 27 September; its Brent series of official EIA closes ends 22 September, so no settled close exists for any day after the seven-day plan was published.

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