Oil's risk premium was repriced on Wednesday on the fighting rather than the diplomacy. Front-month Brent added 1.55 percent to $99.44 a barrel and US West Texas Intermediate for October delivery rose 1.75 percent to $94.66, as the US-Iran war entered its seventh month [1].

The sharpest new signal is analytical rather than kinetic. Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC that the "intensification and broadening" of attacks on shipping had pushed up the probability of Brent exceeding $120. Goldman's base case still assumes Persian Gulf exports gradually recover as producers adapt through alternative routes and, eventually, extra pipeline capacity. What has changed is the weight on a scenario in which exports stagnate for months rather than rebound [1].

That matters because the physical picture has narrowed. NBC News reports a US blockade of Iranian ports is limiting Tehran's exports while the American military helps only a limited number of ships transit on a route through the strait off Oman; Tehran wants vessels to follow a route it chooses, through a waterway that was international before the war [2]. The two positions are incompatible, and the gap between them is where the remaining traffic has to pass.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Wednesday that its forces struck two American vessels and eight tankers - ten in all - in an area of Hormuz it calls "forbidden and unsafe," according to a statement carried by Tasnim [3]. That claim remains uncorroborated, as do its assertions of damage to the destroyers DDG-119 and DDG-53, on which there has been no US comment [2] [3]. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed the accompanying US aviation sanctions as more of a failed strategy [3].

Confidence runs thin in both directions: no independent confirmation of the Iranian hits, and no sign yet that either side is stepping back.