Iran’s Weapon Of Mass Economic Destruction: Hormuz

“We are fighting the Epstein class that either rapes little girls or bombs little girls.”

While not officially closed, the Strait of Hormuz is a “no-go” zone for major international carriers after Iran’s military threats coupled with direct attacks on merchant vessels. Iran’s deliberate strike on the oil tanker Skylight - wounding four sailors just five miles north of Oman’s Khasab port - has ignited a crisis that extends far beyond the immediate violence. The attack, delivered after the vessel ignored Iranian orders to avoid the strait, serves as the opening salvo in what is rapidly becoming a systematic disruption of global energy supplies.

The consequences so far is such that 200 vessels now sit stranded outside the Strait of Hormuz, including at least 150 oil and gas tankers that should be powering the global economy. Commercial traffic has collapsed by 70%, while 170 container ships remain trapped inside unable to exit as Iran asserts control over international shipping lanes.

The world’s largest carriers have already capitulated, with Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM,and Hapag-Lloyd suspending all transits through the critical waterway.

When markets open Monday, the resulting price shock won’t be a temporary fluctuation but the tangible cost of Tehran’s calculated gambit to weaponize the world’s most vital energy chokepoint.

On Sunday, Iran’s FM Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera that the country has no intention of closing the Strait of Hormuz at present, nor any plans to do “anything that would disrupt navigation in it at this stage.”

Either way, this is no longer a regional war, it is economic warfare on a global scale. The Strait is just 21–33 km wide at its tightest, and roughly 20–30% of global seaborne crude oil — about 20–21 million barrels per day — moves through it. Major exporters including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar depend on this single route to supply global markets. A multi-day closure would guarantee that oil not only spikes past $100, it rockets. Monday won’t be an opening—it’ll be chaos.

Missiles kill and destroy, just like the Israeli strike that hit an elementary school in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, killing more than 108 civilians, mostly children.

The attack occurred during school hours when an estimated 170 girls were present in the facility.

Video footage from the scene shows family members screaming while digging through rubble as rescue crews search for survivors.

Iranians live under a brutal and oppressive regime that strips them of their basic human rights and dignities, but that still does not give anyone the right to murder +85 of children at school as Israel did in a strike in Minab.

We must condemn violence proportionally. And hold the most powerful to account.

Dr. Foad Izadi of the University of Tehran commented on the attack during an interview with Al Jazeera, stating:

“We are fighting the Epstein class that either rapes little girls or bombs little girls.”

But shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is that much more consequential, affecting every single person on this planet who drives a car, heats their home, or buys anything that was transported by oil. The real weapon of mass destruction is control of the global energy arteries. Iran just reminded the world that while they may not have aircraft carriers, they have geography, leverage, and the power to make the entire global economy feel their pain.

Context matters here. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. This follows U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed hundreds of Iranian civilians, mostly children, at schools and other places. Washington calls it “destabilizing the regime” as Trump tells Iranians to rise up.

But let’s be real about what’s really happening. Iran didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to strangle the global economy. This is decades of policy failure coming home to roost. The sanctions, the assassinations, the covert operations, the constant threats of regime change, all of it created a pressure cooker by design, making this almost feel like an inevitability.

The question isn’t whether Iran has the right to close the strait. It’s how we got to this point.

Iran has conducted anti-ship missiles drills through these waters for years. The risk of miscalculation isn’t high—it’s existential.

The most disheartening part of this is of course who will pay the price. lt will not be the generals in Washington or Tel Aviv. It will not be the oil executives in Houston or London. It will be the working family in Chicago seeing gas prices rise. It’s the single mother in Berlin shivering because heating costs are unsustainable. It will be the factory worker in Mumbai who loses their job when supply chains start to collapse.

This is the brutal arithmetic of empire. A logic that justifies sending missiles to kill children in Tehran, also justifies squeezing entire economies when the tables turn. The same politicians who lecture Iran about “destabilizing the region” have destabilized it for decades with their military bases, their arms deals, their unconditional support for occupation, genocide, ethnic-cleansing and colonialism.

Iran’s proxies know this too. We can expect more attacks on Gulf facilities next. We can expect the cycle to deepen. Each strike from Washington invites another retaliation from Tehran. Each civilian death fuels more radicalization. And through it all, the weapons manufacturers, the energy traders, the war profiteers—they profit from both sides as usual.

When your cities are bombed and your children killed, how much longer do you accept that the answer is more of the same? This is the new reality of a world where the old superpowers no longer have complete control.

The strait is closed. The world is watching. And somewhere in Washington, someone is calculating how many more civilian deaths it will take to reopen it.

Because that’s always been their calculus.