US Central Command said on Thursday that the United States and its regional partners control the Strait of Hormuz, pointing to more than 40 commercial ships moving through the waterway in the past 24 hours. The Joint Maritime Information Center, in an advisory dated October 15, kept its threat assessment for the strait at severe and warned that deliberate attacks on commercial vessels remain highly likely.
The traffic figures show how far conditions remain from normal. JMIC counted 121 US facilitated transits between October 11 and 14, about 30 ships a day, against a 2025 average of roughly 138 daily transits. That is about 22 percent of the prewar benchmark, and independent commercial tracking showed still fewer movements under a different methodology.
The latest advisory documented eight projectile attacks on October 11 and 13 involving four tankers and four containerships, and a separate attack on a products tanker near Sohar that left two crew members missing. A Singapore flagged containership struck on October 13 caught fire and sank on October 14, with all 21 crew safely evacuated. JMIC now counts 149 confirmed vessel incidents across the region since March 1, while the International Maritime Organization lists 113 highlighted incidents and 24 seafarer fatalities as of October 14, on a different counting basis.
Hundreds of vessels remain at anchor around Fujairah, Dubai and Sohar, and US forces had redirected 135 commercial vessels under blockade enforcement as of October 10 to 11. For charterers and insurers, the gap between an open strait and a normal one is the price of the war.