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Two more supertankers are burning in the strait, on Iran’s account. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy said in a statement that two supertankers carrying more than 4 million barrels of oil between them suffered an incident on the night of November 11 to 12 while passing through the southern route of the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran calls unauthorised and unsafe, stopped after a very large explosion, and are now burning, IRNA reported on Thursday. The statement said the ships had ignored repeated warnings from the Guard’s Hormuz traffic control centre, gave no cause for the explosions, and named no vessel, flag or casualty; it warned that any ship in the Persian Gulf or the strait that switches off its navigation systems and cooperates with the United States in using the southern route will meet the same end. Anadolu Agency carried the same statement the same morning. The claim is the Iranian military’s alone: no US, company, Omani or independent maritime source had corroborated a new tanker incident in the reporting read, and this update is evidence grade C on that basis.
Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview published on Wednesday that the Strait of Hormuz will never return to its status before the war, and that Iran and Oman have reached an understanding to oversee the waterway as part of Tehran’s seven-point proposal to end the conflict. He argued there are no international waters in the strait, that the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does not apply to it, and that its regulations are governed by the laws of the two littoral states that border it. Ghalibaf said Tehran has sent its seven conditions through a Qatari mediator and is waiting for an official American response; the conditions he named include lifting the US naval blockade and sanctions, releasing frozen Iranian funds, ending fighting on all fronts and an explicit announcement that the war has ended. He said Washington had asked President Vladimir Putin to mediate direct negotiations, warned that new US attacks would bring President Donald Trump another defeat, and said Iran is determined to move beyond a state of no war and no peace. The interview is the negotiator’s stated position; Oman has not confirmed the oversight understanding in the reporting read, and no US response to the conditions had been published.
President Donald Trump, speaking at a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, said the conflict with Iran will end soon and that when it ends the world will be a safer place, but he insisted on a complete victory rather than a partial one. Trump said it would take 25 years to rebuild what had been destroyed in Iran and that he hoped the United States would not need to destroy more of the country. His remarks, reported by Yonhap News Agency from Washington, are the American president’s stated position and sit against Tehran’s denial, reported below, that any negotiations are under way.
In the same Al Mayadeen interview, Rezaei widened Iran’s retaliation warning beyond the region. If the United States attacks Iran again, he said, Tehran would target distant American bases it has not previously attacked, including bases in European countries if US aircraft take off from them to bomb Iran, and islands Washington believes are beyond the range of Iranian missiles. He advised countries hosting American forces not to cooperate in a new attack. The warning is a conditional statement of intent by Iran’s security chief, reported by ANI and Iranian outlets from the interview; no specific base or country was named. The France24 report of the same remarks could not be read directly in this run, so the wording here rests on the ANI account and corroborating reports of the interview.
Oil markets moved on the denial. Brent crude rose nearly 3 percent to 93.90 dollars a barrel by 11:18 a.m. ET on Wednesday, and West Texas Intermediate rose nearly 2 percent to 87.98 dollars, OilPrice.com reported, as traders marked down the de-escalation trade that had taken about 21 percent off Brent since the start of November.
Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei has dismissed speculation about negotiations with the United States, telling Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV on Tuesday that claims of continuing talks or a meeting in Qatar were a lie, and that Tehran is still waiting for a clear American response to its seven conditions for peace talks, Al Jazeera reported with Reuters. Rezaei said the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen until those conditions are met; the conditions he and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have named include lifting sanctions and the US naval blockade and ending fighting on all fronts, in particular Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, and Araghchi said the strait could reopen within two days if the demands were met.
The statements cut against the optimism Washington projected this week. President Donald Trump, who met Qatar’s prime minister at the White House on Monday, has said he sees positive momentum toward ending the conflict and that new attacks on Iran are unnecessary. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in Paris where G7 foreign ministers were meeting, said Washington was open to diplomacy and that its economic campaign was so devastating that major combat operations were not needed for now. Maritime monitoring firms cited in the report counted at least 37 attacks on ships in and near the strait in November, the highest monthly total since the war began.