Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met his Omani counterpart, Sayyid Badr Al-Busaidi, in Muscat on Saturday, the first face-to-face contact between the two governments since the United States declared Friday's ceasefire over. Both sides agreed to keep talking about the Strait of Hormuz at technical and political levels. Neither government announced any change to the strait's status: open in name, and barely used in practice.
The document both sides keep citing is the same one. It is the Islamabad memorandum, the June agreement between Washington and Tehran whose ceasefire clause the US declared over on Friday, even as it continues to hold Iran to the memorandum's other terms. Article 5 of that text commits Iran to, in its own wording, "best efforts" arrangements for "the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa."
Washington reads that clause as a commitment to free navigation, coordinated through Oman and the International Maritime Organization. Tehran reads it as preserving its own oversight of who moves through the strait, and how. That gap between two readings of the same sentence is what Araqchi and Al-Busaidi were trying to close on Saturday.
The signals coming out of Tehran do not match each other. Iran's Fars news agency reported on Saturday that there will be no further negotiations until the US changes its position. Iran's ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, struck a different note at the Security Council: Iran remains committed to implementing the memorandum, he said, provided Washington meets its own obligations, but continued US violations would release Iran from its side of the bargain too.
Washington has not shifted either. US officials want a public Iranian pledge of "free and secure transit" through the strait, on top of the three conditions set out on Friday: an end to attacks on shipping, no tolls on any vessel, and the surrender of Iran's stockpiled nuclear material.
The traffic figures explain why the wording matters so much. Data reported on Friday by Lloyd's List Intelligence and the maritime tracker Windward showed just five vessels crossing the strait on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, against 45 the previous Monday and a pre-war baseline of about 130 ships a day. No vessel above 10,000 tonnes deadweight has crossed the US-coordinated "Southern Highway" route with its tracking transponder switched on since July 7; at least two ships have made the crossing with transponders off.
Oman, mediating alongside Qatar, is pushing for the diplomacy to hold. Iran, Oman and Qatar held trilateral talks on the memorandum in Doha on July 1, ten days before Saturday's bilateral meeting in Muscat. Al-Busaidi said his country's position was to use diplomacy, not escalation, and voiced hope that full implementation of the Islamabad memorandum would improve security across the region.
Australia is not at this table. Its RAAF Wedgetail remains deployed to the Gulf and its Tehran embassy shut, while the mediation runs through Doha and Muscat, not Canberra. The bill still lands at the bowser: the ACCC's most recent weekly figures still have average petrol across the five largest cities at 167.5 cents a litre, up 16 cents in a fortnight.
Both governments described Saturday's meeting as a step, not a resolution. Iran and Oman agreed to keep talking at technical and political levels, but neither set a date for the strait to return to normal traffic, and no shipping data more recent than Thursday's count has emerged. As of Sunday, that is the whole of it: a promise to keep talking, a ceasefire Washington still calls dead, and a strait still crossed by a fraction of its usual ships.
