The Associated Press report carried by the Philadelphia Inquirer recounts Saturday's US strikes on three Iranian tankers, which this feed has already covered in detail: CENTCOM said an aircraft carrier and a destroyer evaded multiple Iranian attacks, that two tankers were permanently disabled and a third, unladen one destroyed, and that the vessels belonged to a shadow network funding the Revolutionary Guard [1]. Iran's state broadcaster later confirmed the other two tankers were hit and their crews evacuated [1].

The new element is operational. AP says the US military has been helping to guide ships through the strait as Tehran asserts control and targets some vessels, but that overall traffic remains low [1]. That is the first direct statement in this feed on how transits are actually being handled day to day, and it sits awkwardly beside CENTCOM's earlier assertion that traffic flows unimpeded: escorted transits at reduced volume are not the same thing as normal commercial flow. AP does not give figures, so the scale of the decline remains unquantified.

On the diplomatic track, AP reports that diplomats say the US, Britain, France and Germany now seek to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for failure to comply with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, after negotiations collapsed following a mid-June memorandum of understanding [1]. That concerns the nuclear file rather than the waterway, but it signals no near-term negotiated relief for shipping.

AP also says at least five people were killed earlier in the week in the US bombardment of southern Iran, one strike hitting a wedding, and it reached two wounded girls, Masoumeh Zarei, 13, and Kiana Karimi, 14, in hospital [1]. CENTCOM says it is still examining the wedding reports. At the time of writing AP noted there was no immediate Iranian response to the tanker strikes.