The Strait of Hormuz has two shores. Almost all of the analysis of the 2026 crisis, including most of this site’s analysis, has concentrated on the northern shore — Iran, the IRGC, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the toll booth. The southern shore belongs to the Sultanate of Oman, and specifically to the Musandam Peninsula, the Omani exclave that forms the southern bank of the narrowest part of the waterway. As of late May 2026, the Omani position has become one of the most institutionally significant elements of the entire crisis, and it has done so largely outside the headline coverage. This post reads the Omani position in detail, because it is the element of the present configuration that most directly determines whether any unilateral Iranian toll arrangement can function, and because it is the riparian relationship that a treaty-backed authority would be built around.
The geography that makes Oman decisive
At its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz is approximately twenty-one nautical miles wide. Iran and Oman each claim a twelve-nautical-mile territorial sea, as both are entitled to do under customary international law and the UNCLOS framework. Twelve plus twelve is twenty-four, which exceeds twenty-one. The arithmetic has a consequence that is central to the entire dispute: there is no strip of high seas or international waters running down the middle of the strait at its narrowest point. Every vessel transiting the strait passes through the territorial waters of Iran, of Oman, or of both. There is no neutral corridor.
The Traffic Separation Scheme that the International Maritime Organisation oversees for the strait reflects this geography. Inbound and outbound traffic is separated into lanes, and the lanes are positioned such that the inbound lane runs through waters on the Omani side near the Musandam Peninsula and the outbound lane through waters on the Iranian side, with a buffer between them. The practical effect is that a very large share of routine commercial transit passes through Omani territorial waters on at least one leg of the round trip. Oman is not a bystander to the chokepoint. It is a co-bank of it, with sovereignty over a substantial part of the water through which the traffic actually moves.
The Omani legal position
The Omani government’s position, articulated publicly by the Minister of Transport, Communications and Information Technology, Said al-Maawali, is that “imposing any fees on ship transit would contradict international agreements to which the sultanate is committed.” The position rests on UNCLOS Part III, Articles 37 to 44, which govern transit passage through straits used for international navigation. Article 44 prohibits states bordering straits from impeding transit passage and from suspending it. Article 26 permits charges only for specific services rendered to a vessel — pilotage, towage, emergency response, and similar — and prohibits charges levied by reason only of passage. Oman ratified UNCLOS in 1989 and operates as a state fully bound by the convention.
The legal expert Dr Habib al-Mulla, cited in the regional reporting, has made the operational point sharply: Oman, as a UNCLOS state with sovereignty over the southern territorial waters, can refuse to recognise or enforce any fee imposed by Iran within Omani waters, and can declare its territorial waters open to free transit passage in accordance with the convention. Because so much routine traffic passes through Omani waters, an Omani declaration of free transit would, in practice, provide a UNCLOS-compliant transit route that does not pass through the Iranian fee arrangement at all, for the legs of transit that run through Omani waters.
This is the structural reason the Omani position is decisive. Iran’s PGSA arrangement, analysed in the PGSA on the Suez/Panama yardstick post and in the post on the twelve-article statute, can control transit through Iranian territorial waters. It cannot control transit through Omani territorial waters without Omani cooperation. The geography that gives Iran a claim to the northern bank gives Oman an equal claim to the southern bank, and the southern bank carries a large share of the routine traffic.
Why Iran has been courting Oman
The Iranian government has been in continuous consultation with Oman since early April 2026 on what the Iranian Foreign Ministry describes as a “joint mechanism between the coastal states” for post-war governance of the strait. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi has stated that vessels would need to “coordinate in advance with Iranian and Omani authorities and obtain the necessary permits and licences.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has framed the post-war arrangements for the strait as “a matter for Iran and Oman.” Iranian and Omani experts have met in Muscat, and the consultations have continued without public interruption.
The Iranian courtship of Oman is a tacit acknowledgement of exactly the structural point above: Iran cannot operate a functioning chokepoint toll without the cooperation of the state that controls the other bank. The PGSA can vet and charge vessels for the Iranian-waters leg, but a bilateral Iran-Oman permitting arrangement that covers both banks would, if Oman agreed to it, convert the strait into a genuinely permission-based corridor in a way that a unilateral Iranian arrangement cannot. The Iranian objective in the consultations is to convert Oman from a co-bank that could declare free transit into a co-administrator of a joint permitting mechanism.
The Omani dilemma
Oman has, on the public record, maintained a careful diplomatic ambiguity. Sultan Haitham bin Tariq has not publicly confirmed, denied, or clarified the nature of the consultations. The Transport Minister’s statement that fees would contradict Oman’s international commitments is the clearest public articulation of the Omani position, and it points away from agreement with the Iranian fee structure. But the consultations continue, which points toward Oman remaining engaged rather than rejecting the Iranian approach outright.
The Omani dilemma has several components. Oman has a long-standing policy of strategic neutrality and has historically served as a diplomatic bridge between Iran and the West, including hosting the back-channel that led to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Oman has an incoming Iran-Oman gas pipeline arrangement — reported as on the order of ten billion cubic metres annually over twenty-five years — that creates a structural energy relationship with Tehran. Oman is also a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, whose collective position, articulated in the Jeddah communique and the UN draft resolution analysed in the GCC long-term arrangement post, opposes the unilateral Iranian arrangement and supports a freedom-of-navigation framework. Oman is, in short, structurally pulled toward Iran by geography and energy and toward the GCC and the international maritime framework by its convention commitments and its GCC membership.
The Transport Minister’s statement suggests that, when forced to articulate a position, Oman lands on the UNCLOS side. The diplomatic ambiguity on everything else suggests Oman prefers not to be forced to choose for as long as possible. This is a coherent posture for a small state managing a structural bind between a powerful neighbour and a powerful bloc; it is not, however, a posture that resolves the chokepoint question.
Why Oman is the model for the institutional answer
Here is the point this site most wants to make about the Omani position. The treaty-backed chokepoint authorities the site has been holding up as the model — the Suez Canal Authority and the Panama Canal Authority — are, in the relevant sense, institutional resolutions of exactly the kind of riparian-sovereignty question that Iran and Oman jointly present at Hormuz. Suez runs through Egyptian sovereign territory and Egypt resolved the institutional question by constituting a civilian authority that operates the chokepoint on equal-access terms while Egypt retains sovereignty. Panama runs through Panamanian sovereign territory and Panama resolved the institutional question by constituting a constitutionally-autonomous authority that operates the chokepoint on equal-access terms while Panama retains sovereignty. In both cases, sovereignty over the territory and equal-access operation of the chokepoint were reconciled through an institutional body.
Hormuz differs from Suez and Panama in one structurally important respect: it has two sovereign banks, not one. Suez is entirely Egyptian; Panama is entirely Panamanian. Hormuz is Iranian on the north and Omani on the south. This makes the institutional answer at Hormuz necessarily a joint riparian arrangement — exactly the “joint mechanism between the coastal states” that the Iranian Foreign Minister has named, but on equal-access UNCLOS-compliant terms rather than on the permission-based fee terms the Iranian framework proposes. The two-bank geography that makes Oman decisive is also what makes Hormuz a candidate for a two-state co-administered authority that neither bank could operate alone.
The model exists in fragments elsewhere. The Danish Straits, the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention, and the cooperative arrangements in the Strait of Malacca among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore are all instances of multi-state straits managed under varying institutional frameworks that reconcile riparian sovereignty with the international right of transit passage. The Malacca arrangement in particular — a cooperative mechanism among three littoral states, with user-state contribution to the cost of navigational safety and environmental protection, operating under the UNCLOS transit-passage framework — is a closer structural analogue to the two-bank Hormuz geography than either Suez or Panama. The institutional precedent for a multi-state chokepoint arrangement that does not impose prohibited transit charges but does recover the cost of navigational services from the user states exists and operates today.
What the Omani position means for the negotiation
The Omani position is, in the site’s reading, the single most important lever for converting the present unilateral Iranian arrangement into an equal-access institutional configuration. If Oman declines to join a permission-based bilateral permitting scheme and instead holds to its UNCLOS free-transit position, the Iranian PGSA arrangement remains a half-strait arrangement that controls only the northern-waters legs and cannot deliver the full permission-based corridor the Iranian framework envisions. If Oman is brought into a joint mechanism on equal-access UNCLOS-compliant terms — a Malacca-style cooperative arrangement with user-state contribution to navigational-service costs rather than a permission-based fee — the result is much closer to the institutional answer the site has been arguing for than to the unilateral framework.
The Omani position is therefore the fork in the road. One branch leads to a two-state permission-based corridor that the operator class, the GCC, the United States, and China have all rejected. The other branch leads to a two-state cooperative arrangement on the Malacca model that reconciles riparian sovereignty with transit-passage rights and that the international maritime framework can accept. Oman’s UNCLOS commitments and GCC membership point toward the second branch; Oman’s energy relationship with Iran and its preference for ambiguity leave the first branch open. The comparison page sets out the institutional arithmetic of the cooperative model. The rate schedule prices transit on a services-fee basis consistent with UNCLOS Article 26. The calculator prices a transit against it. The other shore of the strait is where the institutional answer will be decided.
Sources: Alhurra, “Oman’s Legal Position Challenges Iran’s Bid to Impose Hormuz Fees”; PressTV via GlobalSecurity, “Iran, Oman crafting new transit mechanism for Strait of Hormuz: Foreign Ministry,” 18 May 2026; PressTV via GlobalSecurity, “Iran, Oman negotiating new transit framework for Strait of Hormuz: Iranian official,” 27 May 2026; The National, “Oman and Iran discuss measures for smooth transit in Strait of Hormuz,” 5 April 2026; Crypto Briefing, “Iran and Oman in talks to impose permanent transit fees on Strait of Hormuz shipping”; TRT World, “Who controls the Strait of Hormuz? Iran’s toll plan could reshape global maritime order”; House of Saud, “Iran-Oman Hormuz Protocol: From Blockade to Governance”; statements by Omani Minister of Transport Said al-Maawali, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi; United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, Part III, Articles 26, 37-44; Montreux Convention 1936; the Strait of Malacca cooperative mechanism among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore; this site’s prior analyses on the UNCLOS vacuum (24 April), the GCC long-term arrangement (11 May), the PGSA on the Suez/Panama yardstick (19 May), and the twelve-article statute (23 May).