For a week the oil market has traded a single question: when will Iran and Oman sign. On Saturday, two arms of the Iranian state answered a different one. The agreement with Oman is not what opens the Strait of Hormuz, and it was never going to be.
Iran's Supreme National Security Council put six conditions on the record. The Revolutionary Guard said reopening runs on a separate mechanism entirely. And a few hours before either statement, a missile hit a tanker belonging to Abu Dhabi's national oil company inside the strait.
Brent settled Friday at $83.55 after a week that took about 5% off the price on reopening optimism. Markets are closed until Monday.
The Six Conditions
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said the strait remains closed until Washington corrects its behaviour, and then specified what that means.
End threats against Iran's leader. Permanently end military action against Iran and its regional allies. Withdraw the American naval and air forces enforcing the blockade. Compensate Iran for war damages. Lift sanctions. Release frozen assets.
His formulation left no ambiguity about their status. The council will not retreat from these demands, he said, whether in war or in negotiations.
This is the first time Iran has published a complete price for the waterway. Until Saturday the conditions arrived one at a time, each attached to an announcement of progress, which is a pattern we have been tracking all week. Now they are a list.
Read against the Axios description of the deal being drafted with Oman, a 60-day corridor with lanes and mine clearance, the gap is not a matter of detail. Sanctions relief, the withdrawal of the Fifth Fleet's blockade and war reparations are not shipping arrangements. They are the terms of ending a war, and none of them is in the document Muscat and Tehran have been negotiating.
The Revolutionary Guard Says the Oman Deal Is a Different Thing
The Guard has been silent on this file for a week. Its absence from the negotiating room was the single sharpest fact in the reporting, and a senior Gulf official had told CNN it would have to sign off on anything agreed.
On Saturday its spokesman said reopening the strait is not subject to the Oman agreement, that it has its own specific mechanism, and that it is conditional on the United States fully accepting Iran's conditions. An army spokesman added that Iran's authority over the strait is irreversible.
That is a direct answer to the question everyone has been asking, and it is not the answer the price has assumed.
Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the same thing more diplomatically on the same day. The talks are approaching their final stages, he said, very close to a final result. Then: this is not a sign of the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. He tied reopening to the other conditions and to compensation for what Iran calls the American violation of the June memorandum.
So the foreign ministry, the security council and the Revolutionary Guard all said the same thing on Saturday, in three registers. The deal that is nearly done is not the deal that opens the water.
A Tanker Was Hit While This Was Being Said
Early Saturday, a vessel belonging to ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, was struck by a missile about 18 nautical miles east of Khasab. The fire was extinguished. The vessel and crew are safe and there were no casualties.
The United Arab Emirates foreign ministry attributed the attack to Iran, calling it a hostile Iranian attack and an act of piracy by the Revolutionary Guard, and a flagrant violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2817. Condemnations followed from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Two cautions. The vessel has not been named and the precise time has not been published. And while the UAE has attributed the attack directly, the Revolutionary Guard has not claimed it and Iran has not denied it. Every previous strike in this cluster, including the Minoan Pioneer on August 3, remains formally unattributed. This is the first time a government has named a perpetrator outright.
ADNOC's own running count is 15 vessels attacked since the war began, three of them this week, with one crew member killed and 20 injured.
A UKMTO warning was issued on Saturday. We cannot confirm its number because the register blocks automated access, so we are not going to give you one.
Oman Finally Spoke
For four days we noted that one of the two parties to this agreement had said nothing about it in public. That ended on Saturday.
Oman's foreign ministry condemned the repeated attacks on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz as a violation of international law and of territorial sovereignty. It said negotiations are proceeding in a positive and constructive atmosphere. And it stressed the importance of avoiding any actions that could affect those negotiations.
That last clause is doing quiet work. Muscat is publicly warning that the attacks threaten the talks, on a day when a tanker was hit and the UAE blamed Iran.
Note what the statement is not. It confirms that negotiations are happening and that they are going well. It does not confirm the coordinates, the routing, the duration, the fee structure or any term that has been reported this week. Everything specific about this agreement still comes from Iranian officials or from leaked drafts.
For anyone checking this themselves: Oman's ministry site also carries a joint statement with Iran on the Strait of Hormuz dated 23 June, which concerns the earlier Islamabad memorandum. It ranks well and reads like a confirmation. Saturday's statement is a separate item.
Washington Is Describing a Smaller Deal Than Tehran Is Rejecting
Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that the United States is in the middle of the game, that progress was made this week, and that Iran has not delivered everything being sought.
His description of what is being negotiated is worth setting beside the security council's list. Demining. A safe traffic system. An Iranian commitment not to attack commercial vessels. Maximising oil and gas movement through the strait.
That is a maritime safety arrangement. Zolghadr is demanding sanctions relief, reparations and the withdrawal of the US Navy. These are not two positions on one negotiation. They are two different negotiations, and each side is describing the one it wants.
Central Command's blockade has meanwhile kept tightening. Its count of redirected commercial vessels reached 53 on Saturday, up two from the day before. It stood at 44 on August 3.
Two Russian Refineries Were Hit Overnight
Away from the Gulf, Ukrainian drones struck two Russian refineries overnight into Saturday: Ilsky in Krasnodar, with capacity around 120,000 barrels a day, and Syzran in Samara, around 170,000. Both reported fires. Five people were injured at Ilsky.
Neither operator has published a run cut or an export impact, so we are not going to estimate one. The context that matters is that Russian refinery runs fell to about 3.6 million barrels a day in July, the lowest since 2002, after 18 refineries were hit that month. This is a slow, cumulative supply story running underneath the Hormuz one, and it is the reason a bearish Gulf headline has not translated into cheap diesel.
What to Watch
Monday's open is the first honest test. Brent lost about 5% last week on the expectation that a deal was imminent. Saturday supplied a deal that is imminent and an explicit statement from three parts of the Iranian state that it does not open the strait. Those are compatible facts, and the market has not yet had to price them together.
Whether the UAE attribution holds, and whether Iran denies it. A named perpetrator changes the insurance and legal picture in a way that four unattributed attacks did not.
Whether Mojtaba Khamenei ever appears. He has still not approved, rejected or been seen. The contradiction between Axios reporting his approval complete and the Associated Press reporting it had not happened is now six days old and unresolved.
Saudi Aramco's September allocations, still expected in the next few days, which will show whether Asian refiners took the Red Sea and Mediterranean alternates over Ras Tanura.
We wrote on Friday that the transit fee at the centre of this deal may be uninsurable, because Lloyd's underwriters will void war-risk cover for any ship that pays it and Washington has sanctioned the body that would collect it. Nothing on Saturday changed that. What Saturday added is that Iran's security council is not asking for a fee. It is asking for the end of the war.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Oil market conditions can change rapidly. Consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.