Iran seizes tanker in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. official says; tensions stay excessive in area

Iran seized a Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker because it travelled by way of the slim Strait of Hormuz on Friday (November 14, 2025), a U.S. official stated, turning the ship into Iranian territorial waters within the first-such interdiction in months within the strategic waterway.

Iran didn’t instantly acknowledge the seizure, although it comes as Tehran has been more and more warning it may well strike again after going through a 12-day struggle in June with Israel that noticed the US strike Iranian nuclear websites.

The ship, the Talara, had been travelling from Ajman, United Arab Emirates, onward to Singapore when Iranian forces intercepted it, stated the US defence official, who spoke on situation of anonymity to debate intelligence issues.

A US Navy MQ-4C Triton drone had been circling above the world the place the Talara was for hours on Friday observing the seizure, flight-tracking knowledge analysed by The Associated Press confirmed.

A personal safety agency, Ambrey, described the assault as involving three small boats approaching the Talara.

The British army’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre individually acknowledged the incident, saying a doable “state exercise” pressured the Talara to show into Iranian territorial waters. The ship’s Greek house owners didn’t reply to requests for remark.

The Navy has blamed Iran for a sequence of limpet mine assaults on vessels that broken tankers in 2019, in addition to for a deadly drone assault on an Israeli-linked oil tanker that killed two European crew members in 2021.

Those assaults started after U.S. President Donald Trump in his first time period in workplace, unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s 2015 nuclear cope with world powers.

The final main seizure got here when Iran took two Greek tankers in May 2022 and held them till November of that yr.

Those assaults discovered themselves subsumed by the Iranian-backed Houthis assaults concentrating on ships in the course of the Israel-Hamas struggle within the Gaza Strip, which drastically diminished transport within the essential Red Sea hall.

The years of tensions between Iran and the West, coupled with the state of affairs within the Gaza Strip, exploded right into a full-scale 12-day struggle in June.

Iran lengthy has threatened to shut off the Strait of Hormuz, the slim mouth of the Persian Gulf by way of which 20% of all oil traded passes. The US Navy has lengthy patrolled the Mideast by way of its Bahrain-based fifth Fleet to maintain the waterways open.