The US military had established a discreet shipping corridor to move oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, according to sources with knowledge of the operation cited in a report summarized by The Jerusalem Post. The account, reported on August 19, 2026, said the effort had been operating for several weeks amid continued uncertainty over traffic through the strategic waterway.
The unnamed sources said between 15 and 20 tankers had passed safely during the operation. The vessels reportedly followed a southern channel along Oman’s coast. According to the same account, approximately 10 million barrels of oil per day were moving out through the strait and reaching international energy markets, a volume described as about half the level before the war.
Those operational details were attributed to unidentified sources and were not accompanied in the available reporting by an official US military statement. The report therefore presents the corridor, its duration and its throughput as source-based claims rather than independently established facts.
US President Donald Trump separately told reporters that the strait was open and that many vessels were passing through it. He said the United States was “getting a lot of oil out” and linked the reported movement to falling oil prices. Trump contrasted earlier discussion of a possible price of $350 a barrel with what he said was a current level of $84 to $85.
Trump also argued that the Strait of Hormuz would become less important than it had previously been because alternatives had been found and pipelines were being constructed in record numbers. the cited reporting did not provide figures for those pipeline projects or identify the alternative routes to which he referred.
Tracked traffic remained uneven
Preliminary shipping information offered a narrower view of visible vessel movements. Data cited for Tuesday showed six commodity vessels crossing the strait as of 0258 GMT. That was below the nine recorded a day earlier and beneath a 10-day daily average of 11. Although crossings had increased slightly from the weekend, they remained in single digits and were reported to have slowed again on Wednesday amid concerns that ships could be targeted.
The shipping-data provider Kpler cautioned that vessels traveling with their transponders disabled might not appear in its count. That limitation means the tracked totals and the larger estimates attributed to sources are not directly comparable: one covers vessels visible in preliminary data, while the other describes a purported covert operation and an estimated daily oil volume.
There was also a direct disagreement over the waterway’s status. Trump said on Tuesday that no talks with Iran were taking place and maintained that the strait was open. Iran, by contrast, asserted that it remained closed to shipping. The evidence does not resolve that dispute.
Taken together, the reports depict some continuing oil and commodity traffic but leave uncertainty about its scale, visibility and organization. Trump publicly characterized navigation as open, while tracked crossings fluctuated and the alleged military-supported corridor remained based on anonymous sourcing.
