For now, the zone exists on a calendar rather than a chart. Rezaei says the zone should be announced "in the coming days and weeks" [3], which means that for the whole interval between the promise and the publication there is no line to route around, and the conservative response to a boundary described only by its endpoints, the U.S. naval blockade line, the strait, the Persian Gulf [3], is to treat all three as the boundary. The stated test is not position but intention: vessels Iran believes are attempting to transit [1]. A transponder can establish where a hull is; what a master intended is a separate question, and Rezaei gave few other details [2].
Missing from the account is a price: no war-risk premium, no barrels per day through the strait, no freight rate, no crude quote [13], so anyone converting one sentence from Iran's state broadcaster into basis points is supplying numbers the reporting does not. The record does support the direction of the cost, and its address, because both navies have already put commercial hulls in the target set: Iran's earlier attacks at sea were on commercial shipping [10], and the U.S. said it struck three Iranian oil tankers in response to ballistic missiles fired at Navy warships [6].
This is not the first restriction claimed in the same water. Iranian state media already describes an area of the strait as restricted, and says the American vessel it claims to have hit was trying to enter it [5]; Capt. Tim Hawkins of U.S. Central Command calls the strike claim "a total lie" [4]. Both of those can sit in a charterer's file at once, since the enforcement record is disputed while the claim of a restricted area stands unretracted. The new zone extends an assertion Tehran already makes, seaward, until it meets an American blockade line [3], and the interesting part, or rather the expensive part, is the overlap, where a tanker holds permission from one belligerent and prohibition from the other.
Measured against the timeline, the pattern looks incremental rather than sudden. The war opened on February 28 [8], which is 190 days to the September 6 report [12], with a June ceasefire that did not survive the talks [8] and roughly a month of quiet that ended last week [7], and Qalibaf, the parliament speaker and chief negotiator, now says proportionate response is finished and retaliation will be "faster, heavier and more painful" [9].
Publish coordinates and a notification channel and the zone becomes a documented detour, priced in fuel and days. Let the days-and-weeks language expire with nothing on the chart and it was a negotiating position that cost Tehran nothing to hold. The third path is a commercial hull actually stopped inside the claimed area, which moves the question from legal to physical and settles the pricing argument in an afternoon. The middle version is the one worth planning around, on the evidence available: an undeclared line is free to maintain and produces caution without expenditure. The case against that read is in the same source, in Qalibaf's language [9] and in missiles aimed at warships rather than tankers [6], which is the behaviour of a party that has stopped economising.
