Iran's Speaker of the Parliament Ghalibaf says that the US is giving ships "false guarantees" about Hormuz passage

Iran's Speaker of the Parliament Ghalibaf says that the US is giving ships "false guarantees" about Hormuz passage.

Rhetoric of this kind on Hormuz follows a familiar script: Iranian officials periodically cast doubt on the security of transit through the strait as leverage, without closing it, and outright closure has historically remained a threatened rather than executed option given Iran's own export dependence on the same waterway. The channel that matters is freight and insurance rather than immediate physical supply: war risk premia, tanker rates and rerouting costs tend to reprice on escalatory language well before any barrels are actually interrupted, and crude's geopolitical premium on such episodes has typically been front loaded and prone to fade once passage continues undisrupted. The relevant distinction is between verbal posturing and kinetic follow-through; harassment of individual vessels, seizures, or attacks on infrastructure are the steps that have moved markets durably, while speaker-level commentary alone has tended to be noise. Ghalibaf is a senior figure but the operational signals sit with the IRGC Navy and with any change in tanker traffic, AIS behaviour or insurance quotes in the Gulf. The framing about US guarantees also points to the bilateral dimension, so worth noting is whether Washington responds with escort or convoy measures, which in past standoffs have raised both the cost of transit and the risk of incidental confrontation.