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The US Treasury has revoked a general licence authorising the sale of Iranian oil after three tankers were hit in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and Tuesday, testing ongoing peace talks between Washington and Tehran.
A US official said on Tuesday that the Office of Foreign Assets Control had rescinded the waiver to impose “consequences” on Iran because its “actions in the Strait were wholly unacceptable”.
“As President Trump and the administration have repeatedly affirmed, the MOU in effect with Iran is entirely performance-based. Iran will only reap benefits if they exhibit good behaviour,” the US official said, referring to the accord signed between Iran and the US last month to extend their ceasefire for 60 days.
Mohsen Rezaei, adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said on state television on Tuesday that it was clear the US would “lead negotiations to failure”.
The price of oil jumped on news that the US had revoked the waiver. Brent crude settled 3 per cent higher on Tuesday at $74.16 a barrel and continued to climb in after-hours trading, rising as much as 6.1 per cent to a two-week high of $76.36 a barrel.
UK Maritime Trade Operations said that a tanker caught fire after being attacked by an unknown projectile near the entrance to the strait, close to the coast of Oman on Monday night. It later published alerts on Tuesday that two other tankers had been hit in a similar area, one by a drone. One suffered “structural damage”, the maritime authority said.
The strike on the first ship was confirmed by Qatar’s foreign ministry as the Al Rekayyat, a laden LNG tanker belonging to QatarEnergy.
Majed al-Ansari, Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson, described it on X as “an unacceptable attack” on the security of navigation and energy supplies and a “grave and explicit violation of international law”.
Qatar held Iran “fully legally responsible” for the strike, Ansari said.
One person said another of the ships hit was a Saudi crude-oil tanker but that the situation was being investigated.
The strikes are the latest in a sporadic series of attacks on merchant shipping transiting the Gulf as the US and Iran try to come to an agreement over reopening the contested waterway through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas previously passed.
A US official said Iran had fired at least two missiles at commercial ships transiting the strait, according to US media company Axios.
The attacks come amid several days of commemorations in Iran for its slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli strikes early in the conflict.
Traffic has picked up in the strait following the MoU between the US and Iran three weeks ago but still remains far below its prewar levels. As part of the deal, Iran agreed not to charge tolls for 60 days and to clear the main shipping lanes of mines, but it has since insisted that ships should only take a route laid out close to the Iranian coast instead of going to the south near Oman.
After an initial rush, the number of vessels attempting to transit has fallen, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, which said 211 ships had sailed through the waterway in the week to July 5 compared with 262 the previous week.
Another Qatari LNG tanker, the Al Areesh, had been heading for the strait but turned around early Tuesday morning, according to ship-tracking data.
Officials in Pakistan said the country had been forced back on to the more expensive spot market in recent days, raising costs during a scorching summer heatwave.
Pakistan has led back-channel talks between the US and Iran and, in May, struck a separate deal with Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards to help ensure its Qatari LNG supplies could pass through the strait.
A government official in Islamabad said the Al Areesh turned around owing to “another vessel [having been] attacked in the strait”.
“Attacks on LNG vessels after the peace deal are unexpected,” said the official, who is involved in gas procurement from Qatar, which provides almost all of the country’s supplies of LNG. Islamabad was negotiating with Iran and Qatar to receive “assurance” that Al Areesh would not be attacked on a second attempt through the strait, the official said.
Several ships also U-turned at the weekend, according to two people close to the situation and ship-tracking data, while another two shifted from taking the Omani route to one close to Iran.
The US has been providing air cover to some ships transiting via the Omani coast.
The two people said Iranian patrol boats were also present in the strait on Saturday.
