If you have spent the last several months trying to track whether the Strait of Hormuz is open or closed, you are not confused because you are bad at following news, you are confused because the situation itself has been built, almost mechanically, to resist a stable answer. It opens, it closes, it opens a little, under guard, for a fee, for a select few flags, and then it closes again, and each time it does either of those things, someone somewhere declares that this time it is real, this time it is final, and each time, within days or hours, that turns out not to be true. What you are watching is not a strait behaving erratically. What you are watching is a ceasefire that nobody fully agreed to, layered over a war that nobody fully ended, with a chokepoint sitting in the middle of it acting as the most sensitive pressure gauge available to either side.
Start with the basic shape of the thing, because the basic shape explains almost everything that follows. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel between Iran and Oman through which, in ordinary times, something like a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant share of its liquefied natural gas physically has to pass, because there is no other practical route out of the Persian Gulf for the producers who sit inside it. That geography has not changed and will not change. What has changed, repeatedly, since the end of February, is who is willing to let ships move through that geography, under what conditions, and at what risk. Iran shut the strait to commercial traffic after the United States and Israel struck Iranian targets, and once a major war opens in a region that narrow, you do not need a formal blockade order for the strait to functionally close, you just need insurers to stop writing policies and carriers to stop showing up, which is exactly what happened.
That first closure, back in late February and into March, was the loud one, the one most people noticed even if they were not following the day to day. Tanker traffic collapsed toward zero. War risk insurance, the kind that lets a shipping company put a multi million dollar vessel through a contested waterway, either vanished or became so expensive that running it stopped making financial sense. Major carriers, the big container lines that move much of the world’s goods, suspended their transits outright and started routing around the southern tip of Africa instead, adding roughly two weeks to journeys that used to take days. Ports on the other side of the strait backed up with stranded ships, stranded crews, stranded cargo, in numbers that climbed into the thousands of vessels and tens of thousands of mariners at various points. This was not a symbolic closure. It was a real, physically expensive rerouting of global trade.
Then the United States responded the way the United States tends to respond to a chokepoint it considers strategically unacceptable, with force aimed at reopening it. In April, Washington moved to a naval blockade posture of its own, aimed not at closing the strait further but at suppressing the mines and small boat attacks that were keeping it closed. Through April and into May there were strikes on Iranian naval assets, strikes on the drones and mine laying operations threatening shipping, a brief and partial reopening attempt in early May that did not hold, and a long stretch where the strait was technically navigable but practically avoided, because a handful of brave or desperate shipping companies moving through a minefield does not constitute an open trade route in any meaningful sense. This is the period where most of the world’s attention drifted elsewhere, even though the underlying standoff never actually resolved. It just stopped being the lead story.
Which brings us to the part that is actually new, the part happening right now, this week, that prompted the question in the first place. On June 17, after months of indirect and then direct negotiation, the United States and Iran signed something called the Islamabad Memorandum, a fourteen point settlement brokered with Pakistan in the lead role and Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt helping push it across the line. The core of the deal was straightforward on paper, reopen the strait to toll free transit for sixty days, and in exchange the United States would end its naval blockade of Iran. Oil prices fell on the news. Markets, which had spent months pricing in chaos, treated this as the moment the chaos might actually be ending. Coverage in Iran framed it as a kind of vindication, a sign that Tehran had outlasted Washington’s pressure campaign. Coverage elsewhere was more skeptical, and that skepticism turned out to be earned almost immediately, because the deal had a structural flaw sitting in plain sight from the start, which is that Israel was never a party to it.
This is the detail that explains why the thing keeps unraveling, and it is worth sitting with directly rather than glossing over, because it is not a minor footnote, it is the entire mechanism. The Islamabad Memorandum is a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran. Israel did not negotiate it, did not sign it, and has said clearly and repeatedly that it does not consider itself bound by it, particularly when it comes to Lebanon, where Israeli forces have remained in territory seized from Hezbollah since the war began and where Israeli officials, Netanyahu included, have said outright that the country intends to preserve what they call freedom of action against threats they perceive from Hezbollah, memorandum or no memorandum. So you end up with a deal that two of the three relevant militaries actually agreed to, and a third military, arguably the most operationally active one in the immediate vicinity, simply continuing to do what it was doing before the ink dried.
And that is exactly what happened. Even during the negotiations that produced the memorandum, Israel struck Beirut twice, strikes serious enough that they nearly derailed the talks each time before they were even signed. After the preliminary agreement went through, Pakistan and Iran both stated publicly that the ceasefire halted military operations on all fronts, Lebanon included, effective immediately. Israel rejected that interpretation outright. The fighting in Lebanon did not stop, it barely paused, and then it escalated, with Friday the nineteenth seeing dozens of people killed in a wave of Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, the worst single day since the memorandum’s signing, and Israeli military deaths in the same fighting marking it as a real, ongoing, lethal exchange rather than some lingering background skirmish. By Saturday the twentieth, the day you are reading the news that prompted this whole question, there were further strikes near Sidon, more deaths, more wounded, smoke over towns in southern Lebanon, all of it happening while the broader US-Iran framework was supposedly in effect.
From Tehran’s vantage point, the logic of reclosing the strait is not complicated, even if you disagree with the conclusion. Iran’s argument is essentially this, we signed a deal premised on a ceasefire across all fronts, the ceasefire is not holding on the Lebanon front, Israel is the one breaking it, and the toll free transit we promised was conditioned on a peace that does not currently exist, so the condition has lapsed and we are entitled to close the strait again until it is restored. Whether you find that argument legally airtight or convenient and self serving probably depends on where you started from before any of this happened, and reasonable people land in very different places on that. But functionally, the result is the same regardless of who you believe has the stronger case, the strait closes again, the same way it closed in February, the same insurers who were starting to cautiously price risk back down pull out again, the same carriers who were eyeing a return to normal routing stay on the Cape of Good Hope detour instead.
There is also a pattern here that is worth naming plainly, because if you go back far enough you will notice this is not even the first ceasefire in this conflict to collapse within days of being announced. Go back to last June, in 2025, and you will find an earlier Israel-Iran ceasefire, brokered in the immediate aftermath of a twelve day war, falling apart within hours, with each side accusing the other of firing first, with Israel ordering renewed strikes on Tehran over what it called a blatant violation, with Iran denying it had fired anything at all. The specifics differ a year later, the cast of grievances has grown, Lebanon is now central in a way it was not then, but the underlying rhythm, agreement, accusation, denial, renewed strikes, has clearly repeated itself enough times that it should not be treated as a one off surprise anymore. It is closer to a recurring feature of how this particular conflict tries and fails to end.
So when you ask what is going on, the honest answer is that the strait is not malfunctioning, it is functioning exactly as a barometer should. It is measuring, in real time, whether a ceasefire that was signed by two parties is actually being respected by a third party who never signed it, and so far the answer keeps coming back no. Every time Israel continues operations in Lebanon that Iran considers a violation of the broader truce, the strait becomes Iran’s most immediate and economically painful form of leverage, the one card it can play that gets noticed by Washington, by global markets, and by everyone who has spent the last four months rerouting cargo around the southern tip of Africa at enormous cost. That is presumably exactly why Iran keeps reaching for it. A closure of the Strait of Hormuz is loud in a way that a diplomatic protest is not. Oil prices move. Headlines run. Pakistan, which brokered the original memorandum, is reportedly still trying to keep a separate track of talks alive, with further US-Iran discussions said to be opening in Switzerland, suggesting that even amid this latest reclosure, nobody involved has actually abandoned the idea of a durable deal, they are simply negotiating around an Israel shaped hole in the agreement that nobody has figured out how to patch.
What happens next is genuinely uncertain, and anyone telling you with confidence exactly how this resolves is overstating what is knowable right now. The structural problem is not actually about the strait at all, the strait is just where the problem becomes visible. The structural problem is that you cannot have a durable regional ceasefire when one of the three major combatants considers itself outside the agreement entirely, and continues fighting on a front the other two consider central to it. Until that gets resolved, whether through Israel eventually being brought into some parallel framework, or through Lebanon fighting burning itself out on its own timeline, or through enough international pressure changing Israeli calculations, expect the strait to keep doing exactly what it has been doing, opening when the diplomats get a win, closing when the soldiers do not stop. It is less a strait with a problem than a mirror with very good resolution, and right now it is reflecting a peace that exists on paper in Islamabad and does not yet exist on the ground in southern Lebanon.