UKMTO overwhelmed as Hormuz attacks outpace reporting

Britain's maritime security reporting centre has admitted it is "struggling to accurately report true number of attacks" in the Strait of Hormuz, with most targeted vessels now refusing to file incident reports at all. UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said in its latest weekly assessment that it knows of further strikes through other channels but cannot include them in its figures without verification. The monitor tasked with counting the war has, in effect, lost count.

The official tally stands at 135 incidents linked to the Iran-US conflict since hostilities began on February 28. That includes 114 reports of vessel damage and 76 people killed or injured. The latest weekly assessment logged twelve attacks: ten inside Hormuz itself, one in the Arabian Gulf and one in the Gulf of Oman. Of those vessels, one was lost, two were disabled and three have unconfirmed outcomes.

What happened over the weekend?

The violence did not stay inside the strait's narrow confines.

On Friday, the 302,977 dwt VLCC ST3 was hit by an unidentified projectile roughly 68 nautical miles northeast of Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia. According to maritime security firm Vanguard, the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker suffered an engine room fire and lost power. All 15 Indian seafarers were evacuated safely to a nearby UAE-flagged containership.

Later on Friday, a second tanker was attacked about 78 nautical miles northeast of Al Jubail — this time by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a small boat. The projectile damaged the vessel's aft port quarter. The crew were reported safe, though the full extent of the damage remains unclear.

On Saturday, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed two fully laden supertankers, each carrying more than 2m barrels of crude, struck naval mines while transiting Hormuz without Iranian authorisation. The IRGC said both caught fire, one suffering a major engine room explosion that left it immobilised. Neither ship has been identified, and the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) stated explicitly in its latest assessment that there is no substantiation for the Iranian claims. Treat accordingly.

On Sunday, a tug travelling south roughly 20 nautical miles northeast of Khorfakkan was struck by two unidentified projectiles. One crewmember sustained minor injuries; the tug was damaged but continued its voyage.

A separate incident played out on Saturday in the Gulf of Aden, where a skiff carrying seven people approached an LNG carrier and fired two shots before the vessel's armed security team returned warning shots. The attackers withdrew. Maritime authorities are treating that one as suspected piracy rather than a confirmed Iranian attack — a reminder that not every gunshot in the region belongs to the war.

What does this change for shippers and owners?

The counterintuitive headline is that oil keeps moving. Signal Ocean data shows approximately 13.9m barrels per day of crude and another 2.3m barrels per day of oil products still passing through Hormuz. That is the volume that matters for cargo interests, and it has not dried up.

Scandinavian bank SEB argued in a report today that the disruption is "more a risk-premium story than a volume blockage", with oil continuing to move through the shuttle system established to maintain exports. Translation: charterers are paying more for the same barrels, not failing to lift them.

But the picture darkens considerably when you switch from cargo flows to vessel movements. UKMTO's latest figures show just 254 vessel transits in a week — roughly 70% below pre-war levels. JMIC counted around 217 vessels waiting at anchor near Fujairah and Khorfakkan on Sunday, with congestion still building outside the strait.

That gap — full pipelines, empty transit lanes — defines the commercial reality. Owners willing to run the gauntlet face war-risk premiums, projectile strikes and, if the IRGC's claims are ever verified, mines. The shuttle system SEB references concentrates risk on fewer, repeat transits, which is efficient until one of those shuttles becomes the ST3.

There is also a reporting problem with real consequences. If most attacked vessels no longer notify UKMTO, the industry's primary open-source risk picture systematically understates the danger. Forwarders and operators routing Gulf cargo are, in effect, making decisions on a dataset everyone agrees is incomplete — and which the collector itself has now flagged as such.

The numbers that will decide the next few weeks are transit counts and anchorage queues, not incident tallies. With 217 ships stacked up outside Fujairah and Khorfakkan and transits down roughly seven-tenths, capacity is exiting the market even while barrels keep flowing.