Strait of Hormuz: Oman’s navy rescues 25 sailors from a burning merchant ship; a projectile hits a vessel south of Lavan, and the Revolutionary Guards say they halted two more tankers

A fire broke out on the Panama-flagged merchant ship RITI after an attack near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The Royal Navy of Oman picked up the ship’s 25 crew members, acting together with the sultanate’s Maritime Security Centre, 1.6 nautical miles off the coast of the Musandam governorate. The sailors received first aid. The announcement was published on Saturday, October 31 by the Omani newspaper Oman Observer. The MarineTraffic tracking platform lists RITI as a crude oil tanker.

The incident adds to a series of incidents involving merchant ships in the passage. On Thursday the Revolutionary Guards claimed that three tankers hit mines on a route that Tehran regards as “unauthorised”.

A projectile south of Lavan

On Friday, October 30, the British maritime operations agency UKMTO recorded another hit, this time in the Persian Gulf: a projectile of unknown origin struck a ship 40 nautical miles (about 74 kilometres) south of Iran’s Lavan island, causing a fire. Its seafarers are not in danger and no environmental damage has been reported, the agency added on X. A similar earlier incident, with a projectile hitting a tanker, had been recorded on October 21 off Bukha, also in Musandam.

The Guards say they halted two more tankers

The Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a new statement on Friday, relayed by the Iranian agency Tasnim. According to the Guards, two tankers had switched off all navigation and position-tracking systems, ignored repeated radio warnings and, with American backing, tried to leave the Strait through unauthorised routes. One was moving in the eastern and the other in the western part of the passage, and they ended up “involved in incidents” and immobilised in the southern waters of the Strait. The Guards attribute the immobilisation and the fires to hostile US actions and to the ships’ refusal to follow Iranian rules for the passage.

A few hours earlier Iran’s regular Navy had announced that a “violating” tanker hit sea mines on Thursday before noon in a prohibited zone east of the Strait and suffered damage and a fire. Iranian armed forces warn that the Strait is closed to ships that try to pass through prohibited and unsafe zones without coordination.

Injured Indian seafarers in Muscat

Indian seafarers are also among the victims. India’s ambassador to Oman, Prasad Pise, visited injured crew members from a recent attack on a merchant ship at the KIMS hospital in Muscat and met doctors and families. The Royal Air Force of Oman also airlifted a crew member of an Indian vessel hit in the Strait from the Khasab hospital to the Khoula hospital in Muscat for specialised treatment.

CENTCOM insists the lanes are open

The American side gives a different picture. US forces remain in the region so that all main Hormuz lanes stay “free and unimpeded”, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said in a video on Friday, adding that the internationally recognised main shipping lanes had been “successfully cleared of Iranian mines”. To support his position he said that with American help Gulf countries have sent more than 1.5 billion barrels of crude through the Strait since the summer. In the same video Cooper said he had visited units of the more than 50,000 US troops in the region.

The question of the lanes is central to the conflict that began on February 28. For shipping the picture remains murky: each side gives its own version of which route is safe, while crews are caught in between.