4 September 2026.

Situation

The Strait of Hormuz continues to operate at a fraction of its pre-crisis capacity, with PortWatch's most recent published day, 2026-08-30, recording just 6 transits against a baseline of 85 per day. The lead operational development is Iraq's active search for tankers willing to run the strait, carried by Bloomberg and Briefs Finance. That search is itself a signal of how severely commercial operators have pulled back from the corridor. The site's Crisis Pressure composite remains in the extreme band, flat over the past 24 hours, with physical transit deviation as its top contributor. The Escalation Forecast sits in the elevated band but has eased over the same period, with the Brent-WTI forward spread cited as the top contributor to that directional shift; the two composites are diverging, and that gap is worth watching. Brent was at $95.83 at the time of writing (23:56 UTC), up 0.02% over 24 hours; futures markets are closed and that figure is a carried-forward pre-close delta, not a live signal. On the military dimension, USNI News reports that the United States resumed striking Iranian targets along the strait this week as tensions rose, though that report is single-source and has not been corroborated independently. The site indexed 37 events in the last 24 hours across ship incidents, strikes, and diplomatic signals.

Recorded