Is the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Tracking the world’s most contested shipping lane right now.

At the eastern mouth of the Persian Gulf, where the Strait of Hormuz opens into the Gulf of Oman, three uninhabited islets break the surface. They are the Quoin Islands, wind-blasted rocks that few people could name. For more than a century they have marked the threshold of the busiest oil route on Earth. In 1914 the British built the Didamar Lighthouse on the smallest islet, a hexagonal steel tower whose beam still reaches 23 nautical miles out across the Gulf of Oman. Sailors once called it the end of one world and the beginning of another.

Great Quoin Island, at roughly 26 degrees 30 minutes north and 56 degrees 30 minutes east, sits exactly where the inbound and outbound lanes of the strait converge. It is the waypoint every eastbound tanker logs as it clears the passage. To know whether a ship has made it out of the Gulf, this is the point it has to pass.

This month that threshold became the center of a standoff. On June 17, US President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war, and one of its first effects was to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The passage is only about 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest, yet roughly 21 million barrels of oil move through it every day, close to a fifth of the world's petroleum liquids.

Three days later, it closed again. On June 20, Iran announced it was reclosing the strait, citing Israeli violations of the Lebanon ceasefire and Washington's failure to honour the agreement's first clause, an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah had continued. Tehran said the deal was broken.

What is actually happening in the water is contested. US Central Command said traffic had increased, reporting 55 merchant ships through the strait on June 20 carrying more than 17 million barrels of oil, a level it described as a record reaching back to before the war. Independent trackers tell a different story, showing between zero and four vessels in transit at any moment against a pre-crisis norm of about 94 a day. IMF PortWatch logged no transits at all as recently as June 14, even as a separate count of Gulf-port arrivals recorded 139 in a single day. Across the wider region, around 515 vessels sit anchored or stopped, waiting.

The stakes reach far beyond the oil price. The strait is the only sea exit for Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, and the main one for Saudi Arabia and Iraq, with no real alternative for most of that trade. The long detour around the Cape of Good Hope adds 10 to 14 days and thousands of dollars to a voyage, and Salalah in Oman, the nearest major diversion hub, was itself hit by drones in March. Brent crude trades near 81 dollars a barrel, below its crisis peaks but carrying a heavy premium for uncertainty.

Diplomacy is still moving. On June 21, US and Iranian negotiators in Geneva opened a communication line meant to prevent incidents and keep ships safe through a 60-day window. Whether it holds is the question the whole shipping industry is waiting to answer. At the mouth of the strait, the Didamar Lighthouse still turns through the night, its beam sweeping the dark water it has guided ships across since 1914. The only question left is whether anyone dares sail toward it.