crew welfarePosts by

Approximately 20,000 seafarers are stranded across roughly 2,000 vessels in the Persian Gulf. The ITF has fielded 1,900 assistance requests, repatriated 450 crew, and designated the strait a Warlike Operations Area. The IMO Secretary-General has stated there is no safe transit anywhere in the strait. None of the routine coordination a treaty-backed chokepoint authority would provide currently exists at Hormuz.

Between twenty and thirty thousand seafarers are aboard two to three thousand stranded merchant vessels in the Gulf today. Most are Indian nationals. Drinking water is running out. At least one onboard death has been attributed to medevac failure. Today two Indian flagged ships were fired on in the same waterway. A functioning chokepoint authority would treat their welfare as standing operations, not as a humanitarian footnote.