Twenty-five sailors have died around Hormuz since February, the UN says, and October was the worst month yet for attacks on ships

The people paying the steepest price for the fight over the world’s most important oil chokepoint are not on warships. They are the crews of tankers and cargo ships, and at least 25 of them have now been killed.

Khaled Khiari, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, gave the figure to the UN Security Council on Friday, New York time, using data from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) that runs to 11 November. He told members the situation “cannot be allowed to become the new normal” and called for navigation in the region to be fully restored.

The IMO has recorded 136 security incidents involving vessels in Hormuz and the wider Middle East between 1 March and 11 November. October was the worst month of the conflict, with 35 incidents, and 10 more were logged in the first 11 days of November.

Who are the people being killed?

They are merchant sailors: the crews who move oil, gas, fertiliser and consumer goods through the Gulf. Mr Khiari said civilian vessels and commercial shipping “must not become targets”.

The most recent death the IMO has linked to the conflict was a crew member on the tanker Velos Sapphire, which was attacked on 5 November. IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez said after the agency’s council met in early November that seafarers were still being killed and seriously injured, and that others had been abandoned and kept from going home. The IMO has previously estimated that about 20,000 seafarers were stuck in the Persian Gulf.

Why is the toll still climbing?

Because the strait is open on paper and contested in practice. Tehran requires ships to obtain Iranian approval before they cross while the war continues, and it has repeatedly attacked vessels it accuses of ignoring that rule. Iranian officials say the strait will not reopen until the US ends its naval blockade of Iran’s ports, lifts sanctions, releases frozen Iranian funds, ends fighting on all fronts and formally declares the war over.

The US military says it has cleared the strait’s main routes of mines and that the waterway is open to commercial shipping.

On Saturday, Iranian authorities said three oil tankers had struck mines and caught fire after sailing through what Iran calls restricted areas of the strait. Iran did not name the ships, and the claim has not been independently confirmed. Iran’s navy warned that tankers entering the restricted zone east of the strait would be set on fire by naval mines.

What does it cost everyone else?

Shipping through Hormuz is running about 65 per cent below pre-war levels, according to the latest figures from the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre. Mr Khiari told the council the current arrangements were “costly, unpredictable, and unsafe”, and said the disruption was pushing up energy, transport and insurance costs, feeding inflation and threatening food security, with fertiliser shipments badly constrained.

That last point reaches well beyond the Gulf: farmers buying fertiliser for next season pay for every week the strait stays dangerous.

Where does Australia fit in?

Australia imports most of its liquid fuel, and much of it is refined in Asian plants that depend on Gulf crude. Global oil supply has recovered enough that the world is now pumping more than it burns, but diesel, the fuel that moves Australian freight and runs its farms and mines, remains tight. Every attack on a tanker adds to the insurance and freight costs that end up in the price at the pump.

Safe shipping lanes are also expected to be on the agenda when the leaders of Australia, the US, Japan and India meet in Manila next week.

How does this compare with the Red Sea?

The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 forced most big container lines to sail around Africa instead. Hormuz offers no such detour for the oil and gas that leave the Gulf: there is no way out of the Gulf by sea except through the strait itself.