Iran Says It Will Name Its Price for Reopening the Strait of Hormuz — and Ending the War Is on the List

Iran is putting together a formal list of conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, who said mediators had asked Tehran to set its terms out in writing. Speaking through an interpreter in an interview with Al Manar TV, Rezaei said an end to the wider regional war is among the items on that list, according to Al Jazeera.

A corridor already sketched out with Oman

Rezaei said Iran and Oman have already agreed on the shape of a shipping corridor through the strait, with part of the route running through Omani waters and part through Iranian waters. Under that plan, vessels would travel through a designated central channel once the United States meets Iran's conditions. Speaking separately to Iran's IRNA news agency, Rezaei put the sequencing plainly: Washington has to act first. "The US must first take practical steps to fulfil Iran's conditions, and then Iran will proceed to open the Strait of Hormuz," he said, as reported by Al Jazeera.

The remarks came as Qatar's prime minister held talks in Tehran — the third mediating government to visit in the span of a week, after delegations from Pakistan and Oman. Qatar's foreign ministry said the discussions covered a temporary corridor through the strait as well as a joint project to clear mines from the waterway, a detail that lines up with the U.S. military's own recent claims about mine-clearing efforts there.

The Revolutionary Guards are setting a higher bar

Iran's Revolutionary Guards have staked out a tougher public position than Rezaei's corridor talk suggests. A Guards spokesperson said this week that the strait would not reopen unless Washington lifts what Tehran calls a blockade of Iranian ports, pays compensation for war damage, and removes sanctions — conditions well beyond a simple shipping-lane agreement, according to Reuters. Iranian officials tied to the Guards have separately said the strait's security should be "managed by the countries of the region themselves" rather than by the United States, reflecting a broader demand that U.S. forces pull back from the Gulf.

That gap between a workable technical arrangement — Iran and Oman already discussing lane-sharing and revenue-splitting — and Tehran's much larger political demands is the real obstacle to reopening the strait, not the logistics of the corridor itself.

Washington isn't budging either

The U.S. position has not softened. President Trump said this week that the United States is not currently talking with Iran and is instead focused on punishing the country economically, while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the economic pressure campaign will continue until Iran negotiates "meaningfully," according to reporting compiled by the Just Security Early Edition. That stalemate is playing out even as Iranian business and banking activity continues openly in Dubai, despite the threat of U.S. sanctions on firms that deal with Tehran.

It also follows CENTCOM's claim last week that it had cleared Iranian sea mines from the strait — a "milestone" that hasn't translated into normal traffic. Nightly tanker movements through Hormuz are still running at roughly half of pre-war levels, and some U.S. allies remain doubtful the strait is fully clear, underscoring how far the diplomatic track still has to go before shipping actually returns to normal.