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Three Saudi supertankers carrying some six million barrels of crude oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, maritime trackers said, marking an early and tentative resumption of traffic through the world's most critical energy chokepoint following a US-Iran agreement to reopen the route.
The crossings came after President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding in which Iran committed to immediately reopening the strait, ending more than three and a half months of near-total disruption to a waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and gas supply once flowed daily.
Despite the diplomatic breakthrough, industry groups warned Thursday that serious dangers remained, and that traffic was still running far below pre-war levels.
Maritime data firm Kpler counted eight commercial vessels transiting the strait by 1430 GMT Thursday, roughly equal to the thin average daily volume recorded over the previous week but well short of the 120 daily crossings logged before the war began on February 28, according to shipping journal Lloyd's List.
Among the eight were three very large crude carriers, each transporting two million barrels of Saudi oil.
Also making the crossing was the Mraikh, a loaded liquefied natural gas carrier described as the first French LNG vessel to transit the strait since the conflict began.
The vessel began moving on Wednesday, around the time the Trump-Iran memorandum was announced.
Kpler said only 15 LNG carriers in total, including the Mraikh, had departed the Gulf with cargo since the start of the conflict, all of them carrying Qatari or Emirati LNG.
Despite the political agreement, leading shipping lobby BIMCO cautioned that conditions in and around the strait remained dangerous. "Significant safety and security risks still persist," said Jakob Larsen, BIMCO's chief security officer. "The central part of the Strait is mined and un-navigable," he added.
Larsen noted that the agreement between Washington and Tehran lacked specifics on clearing vessels from the Gulf, but said BIMCO expected "an international coordination body to be established shortly to facilitate transits."
The human toll of the blockade remained severe. The International Maritime Organization said more than 500 commercial vessels were still trapped in the Gulf as of Thursday, with roughly 11,000 seafarers aboard.
The IMO estimated that 20,000 seafarers in the region had been affected by the war overall, a figure that underscores the scale of the disruption even as diplomatic progress inches forward.
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