Iran and Qatar Discuss Strait of Hormuz Amid US Blockade

There are families in Hormozgan province, along the Iranian shore of the Strait of Hormuz, who are rationing diesel for hospital generators while their government’s foreign minister sits across a table in Tehran from his Qatari counterpart discussing the very waterway that carries the fuel they lack. The population affected is not a figure I can give you with honesty, but it is not abstract: it is the patient on a ventilator when the backup generator runs dry, the fishing families whose boats cannot bunker, the clinic that cannot refrigerate insulin. The rule that should be protecting them is not obscure. The San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, drafted by naval lawyers precisely because the laws of land warfare said nothing adequate about blockades, prohibits any blockade whose effect is to starve the civilian population or whose damage to civilians is disproportionate to the military advantage sought. The Fourth Geneva Convention’s provisions on the free passage of medical supplies apply with equal force whether the vessel in question flies a naval ensign or a merchant flag.

Is the rule being followed? I cannot say with the precision I would want, because that precision requires inspection records I do not have and no independent monitor appears to have either. This absence is itself the finding. A blockade that squeezes a nation’s oil supply without any visible humanitarian carve-out, without a published protocol for medical and food cargo, is not automatically unlawful - but it is automatically unverifiable, and unverifiable is where violations live comfortably for years before anyone answers for them.

Thursday’s meeting in Tehran matters here in a way that runs deeper than diplomacy. Qatar is not a disinterested convener. Its own liquefied natural gas exports pass through the same narrow water, which means Doha’s foreign minister sat down not as a mediator performing neutrality but as a fellow hostage to the chokepoint, negotiating on behalf of his own tankers as much as Iran’s. That shared exposure is worth naming, because it is the one lever available against a blockading power that answers to neither Tehran nor Doha: a coalition of littoral and dependent states insisting jointly on a monitored humanitarian corridor is harder to wave away than either government pleading alone.

What institutional capacity exists to make any of this real. The International Committee of the Red Cross has decades of experience negotiating access with blockading navies - during the tanker crises of the 1980s, delegates secured passage for identified humanitarian cargo through contested Gulf waters by establishing inspection points that satisfied the blockading power’s security concerns while guaranteeing delivery on the other side. The precedent exists, tested and documented. Whether it has been offered, or requested, in the present crisis is not stated anywhere before me, and that silence is the gap I am obliged to record.

The obligation, stated plainly, falls first on the power conducting the naval blockade: publish the criteria by which cargo is inspected and released, permit independent verification of those criteria by a body with no stake in the underlying dispute, and distinguish, in practice and not merely in principle, between fuel destined for a hospital generator and fuel destined for a warship. Iran’s obligation is no lighter - a government that allows its own domestic shortfall to become a bargaining chip against cooperation with inspection regimes is choosing its population’s suffering as leverage, which the Conventions permit to neither the blockaded nor the blockading.

I have seen what happens when armies treat logistics as someone else’s problem. At Solferino it was stretcher-bearers who simply did not exist. In the Gulf today it is the diesel truck that never reaches the clinic in Bandar Abbas, because no one thought it worth writing down which trucks may pass.