Iran Closes Strait of Hormuz Again After US Maintains Port Blockade

On Saturday morning, Iran announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz again—just hours after reopening it on Friday. The reversal came as a direct response to the United States maintaining its blockade of Iranian ports, a move that undercut what had seemed like a breakthrough in weeks of escalating Middle East tensions.

The Friday reopening had been greeted with relief. Stock markets rose. Oil prices fell sharply. President Donald Trump told the AFP that a broader peace agreement between Washington and Tehran was "very close." For a moment, it appeared the machinery of diplomacy might actually work. Iran had agreed in good faith, its military command said, to allow a limited number of tankers and commercial vessels through the strait—one of the world's most critical chokepoints for energy supplies. But the Americans, Tehran's armed forces declared on Saturday, continued their "acts of piracy" under the guise of the blockade. So the Iranians were closing it again, placing the strategic passage back under their strict control.

Before the war began on February 28, nearly 120 ships moved through the strait each day. On Saturday morning, MarineTraffic showed a tentative resumption: just over ten vessels in the area, including tankers. But by 9 a.m. GMT, at least two appeared to be turning back. One cruise ship, the Celestyal Discovery, had made an empty transit between Dubai and Muscat—the first such passage since fighting started. That fragile window was closing.

The numbers tell the story of what hangs in the balance. Twenty percent of the world's crude oil and liquefied natural gas passed through Hormuz before the conflict. The strait's closure ripples through global markets instantly. The blockade itself had already taken a toll: the U.S. Central Command announced on Saturday that 21 ships had complied with American orders to turn around and return to Iran since the blockade began.

Trump had insisted Friday that the American blockade would remain "fully in effect" until negotiations concluded, and would continue if no deal was reached. He also claimed Iran had agreed to hand over its enriched uranium—a crucial negotiating point. Iran denied this immediately. The gap between what each side said the other had conceded revealed how fragile the peace process actually was, how easily one side's breakthrough could be the other's capitulation.

Diplomacy was still moving elsewhere. Pakistan's army chief, General Asim Munir, concluded a three-day visit to Iran on Saturday. Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrapped up a tour that had taken him through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey—all players in the region's intricate power dynamics. These were the quiet moves of mediation, the kind that rarely make headlines but sometimes shift outcomes.

In Lebanon, the other major theater of this war, a ceasefire between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement had begun Friday at midnight. The month-and-a-half conflict had killed nearly 2,300 people on the Lebanese side and displaced more than one million. Now many were returning home to the south or to Beirut's southern suburbs. But Israeli forces remained positioned ten kilometers inside Lebanese territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear the operation was not finished—there were still things Israel planned to do about the rocket and drone threats from Hezbollah. Lebanon's president, Joseph Aoun, said his country was working toward "a permanent agreement" with Israel, one that would protect Lebanese rights and sovereignty. A ceasefire, he said, was only a transition phase. The real negotiation was still ahead.