A Tanker Is Attacked in Hormuz and Eleven Indians Hurt
Oman’s air force has evacuated ten crew from the Panamanian-flagged On Peace after a projectile struck it nine nautical miles off Limah on Tuesday, setting the vessel alight. India’s foreign ministry says at least twelve of the nineteen crew were injured, eleven of them Indian nationals; seventeen of the crew were Indian. No group has claimed the attack.
The shipping intelligence service Marisks counts at least seven other tanker incidents in the past week. Iran effectively closed the waterway when the war began on 28 February, has repeatedly attacked vessels that do not use its designated route, and says it wants to charge ships for passage. India, the largest single supplier of seafarers to merchant shipping, said in July that at least ten Indian sailors had been killed since late February; another Hormuz attack in September killed one more. The counter-intuitive part is the cargo. Middle East crude exports are back to pre-war levels — a seven-day moving average of 18.3 million barrels a day on 30 September, against about 18 million a day in the twelve months before the war, on provisional Kpler figures. What has not normalised is the price: Brent closed Tuesday at $101.51 against $72.48 the day before the war began. That gap is insurance, detours and risk premium rather than any shortage of barrels. The evacuated crew were treated at Khasab hospital in Musandam. Watch for attribution, because an unclaimed strike on a Panamanian hull with a mostly Indian crew pushes Delhi towards a posture it has spent eight months avoiding.