ESCALATION CONTINUES (Day 136, July 14). Strikes did not pause for Khamenei's funeral as Trump had suggested they might; a fresh round hit Iran July 11–13, layered on top of the July 7–9 cycle that first pushed Hormuz to CRITICAL on July 10. On Sunday July 12, Iran's IRGC struck two supertankers that had gone AIS-dark attempting an "unauthorised" route (a claim from Iran's Mehr News, not independently verified); separately, a Cyprus-flagged container ship was hit, with one Indian crew member still missing. On Monday July 13, the United Arab Emirates' state oil company ADNOC confirmed two of its OWN tankers were struck by projectiles while transiting the strait in Omani territorial waters — one mariner killed, several injured. This is a first-party operator disclosure, not a third-party claim, and it lands differently than earlier strikes on other flags' vessels.
CENTCOM launched a third consecutive night of strikes on Iran across the July 7–13 window (80+ targets total); Iran's IRGC responded by hitting a US-linked base in Jordan — Al-Azraq, with 10 ballistic missiles, 8 of which Jordan's own Armed Forces said were intercepted — and separately struck US-linked sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. Speaking from the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump reiterated that the MoU is "over," floating both a strike on Iran's power and water infrastructure and potentially seizing Kharg Island, the terminal that handles roughly 90% of Iran's oil exports.
Two new elements changed the shape of the crisis this week that were not present a week ago. First, the US Navy reimposed its blockade on Iranian-flagged shipping, effective 4pm ET today (CENTCOM confirmed). Second, and separately, President Trump announced that the US itself will now charge a 20% toll on the value of all OTHER cargo transiting the strait — roughly $32 million per supertanker at current prices — naming Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait as the intended payers, framed as compensation for the US role as the strait's "guardian." This is a toll claim layered on top of, not instead of, Iran's own reserved right (from the June MoU) to introduce charges once its 60-day free-transit window expires — two competing toll claims now stand over the same waterway simultaneously.
Physically, the deterioration is unambiguous and worse than the reading that first triggered Thursday's critical call: Kpler counted just 14 vessels transiting the strait on Sunday July 12 (four of them crude tankers), down roughly 60% from the 37 that crossed on the same day the prior week — the worst single-day print since the June 18 reopening began. Windward Maritime Intelligence reports that traffic on the US-protected southern (Omani) corridor "effectively collapsed" on Saturday and "all but disappeared" over the weekend, as operators increasingly comply with Iran's demand to route via its own northern, territorial-waters lane instead — a reversal of the operator-confidence rebuild GEF tracked through late June and early July. Iran continues exporting regardless of the pressure: Kpler's Matt Smith estimates more than 9.2 million barrels of Iranian crude have transited Hormuz since the ceasefire was declared over on July 8, much of it via six US-sanctioned supertankers (12 million barrels of combined capacity) that ran AIS-dark through the strait in the past week — a direct consequence of Washington's July 7 reimposition of sanctions on Iranian oil sales, which gave those cargoes nowhere legal to sell. No LNG tankers were visible on tracking data entering the strait over the weekend, a leading indicator worth watching independent of the aggregate transit count.
Crude has largely caught up to the physical severity this time, closing the price/physical divergence GEF flagged as this week's most analytically interesting wrinkle. Brent settled Monday at $83.30, up 9.59% — its largest single-day percentage gain in more than six years and the highest settle since June 12; WTI settled $78.14 (+~9.4%). Tuesday intraday, Brent traded as high as roughly $86–87 (no settle yet at time of writing — not printed as one), putting the benchmark roughly 19% above its pre-war level.
GEF's own operator AIS audit, running continuously since July 1, has been extended by five new frames (July 11 10:55 through July 14 09:53 local). CASPIA, MAOMING and AZARKHSH 908 are present in every one of the five new frames — a new persistent trio. More notably: COBA — the single vessel present in literally every frame of the prior 14-frame, July 1–10 audit — remained present through July 11, both July 12 frames and July 13 morning, extending its unbroken streak to at least 18 consecutive frames over roughly 13 days, before finally dropping out of the July 14 09:53 frame — the same morning the blockade took effect. ATEELA 1 and ATLANTIS II, also multi-week fixtures of the chokepoint, dropped out of that same frame. A correction to last week's reporting: the July 10 briefing assessed MARIVAN as "likely genuinely departed" after two consecutive absent frames — MARIVAN in fact reappeared in all four subsequent frames (July 12 morning through July 14), so that departure read did not hold across the fuller window. GEF is noting the correction plainly rather than letting the earlier framing stand quietly. The broader compositional turnover visible in the July 14 frame — several small Iranian-flagged or local craft cycling in as the long-resident names cycled out — is consistent with, though does not on its own confirm, the Kpler/Windward transit-collapse reporting above; GEF treats it as corroborating pattern evidence, not a standalone transit count.
Unlike the June 20–21 episode, this week's deterioration does not rest on a rhetorical Iranian "closed" declaration — it is corroborated by CENTCOM's own strike confirmations, ADNOC's first-party tanker-strike disclosure, Jordan's own interception statement, and two independent Kpler transit prints (7-vs-25 on July 8, 14 on July 12). Physical evidence and rhetoric agree this time. Separately, CNN reported Tuesday that the crisis is shifting shape from a crude-supply problem to a refined-product problem: Russia's Ukraine-drone-driven refinery losses (an estimated 800,000 barrels/day of lost diesel exports, roughly 12% of world diesel shipments, per Lipow Oil Associates) combined with Asian refiners throttling runs have pushed diesel futures up 20% over three weeks, even as crude supply has partially rebuilt off inventory draws — relevant context for GEF's storage and fuel-prices pages this week.
For the current risk matrix and outlook, see the Risk Analysis page; for the live chokepoint picture, see Marine Traffic.