Two days after we published Week 28 calling the funeral truce a one-week pause with a July 9 expiry, it broke early. The June 28 stand-down collapsed the night of July 7: three commercial tankers were struck in and near the Strait of Hormuz, the US answered with strikes on Iranian air-defense and anti-ship targets, and Washington revoked the waiver that had let Iran sell oil. On July 8, at the NATO summit, President Trump declared the truce over. Brent jumped about 5% on the day to roughly $79, and our crisis score reset from 65 to 78. This is a sharp re-escalation, not a confirmed closure. Here is what is real, what it changes, and where our own week-old calls now stand.
Three tankers hit (confirmed). On the night of July 7, three commercial vessels were struck in and near the strait: the Qatari-flagged LNG carrier Al Rekayyat (projectile, engine-room fire, no casualties), the Saudi supertanker Wedyan (described by US officials as an IRGC missile strike, significant damage), and a third drone-hit vessel with minor damage. UKMTO confirmed the strikes; neither CENTCOM nor the IRGC has formally claimed authorship, though Qatari and Iranian state accounts point at Iran.
US strikes back (confirmed). CENTCOM confirmed a new wave of strikes overnight on Iranian air-defense, command-and-control, and anti-ship missile sites, plus dozens of IRGC fast-attack boats near the strait, framed explicitly as retaliation for the tanker attacks. Iran claims counter-strikes on US sites in the Gulf; that claim is one-sided and unverified.
The truce, "over" (attributed). Washington revoked the waiver permitting Iranian oil sales, and at the NATO summit Trump said the truce "is over" while adding that his negotiators may keep talking if they want. This is the President's characterization, not a formal, mutual termination: Iran issued no matching declaration, and the negotiating track is bruised, not buried. We report it as his stated position, not as a bilateral fact.
Not a closure (measured). There is no new closure order or naval blockade. Transit was already degraded before this week, running near 30 to 40 percent of the pre-crisis norm; renewed attacks put even that at risk. The honest status is contested with live closure risk, not a shut chokepoint. We hold our discrete verdict at Contested until transit data confirms a material halt, and we will flip it the moment it does.
Oil: the war premium is back, but capped
Brent ran from the low $70s to about $79 as the truce broke, but the move is a fraction of the spring, when the blockade took Brent to $118. The reason is the same one that has defined the whole de-escalation: OPEC+ has been adding supply for five straight months and the market is well stocked, so a genuine attack-driven shock now lifts price by single-digit percent rather than doubling it. The tell to watch is not the flat price but the shape: a sustained bid and a widening war-risk structure would say the market is pricing a real supply interruption, not a headline.
Freight and insurance: the fast lane reprices first
If July 8 holds a lesson for operators, it is that the cost of moving oil moves before the barrel does. War-risk hull rates, which had eased toward 2 percent of vessel value, will reprice up hard on confirmed tanker strikes; bunker premiums at Fujairah, which had collapsed toward parity with Rotterdam, are the first place a re-escalation shows. If you renegotiated surcharges on last week's calm, that window may have just closed. Insurance is a memory market and it just got a fresh memory.
The strait itself: rhetoric over a throttle
Iran's "no safe passage without recognizing our authority" is not new language; it has claimed control since March and warned ships off its designated routes on July 3, before this week. What changed is that the threat is now backed by fresh strikes on actual hulls. The practical state is a throttled strait made more dangerous, layered on top of traffic that never recovered from June. Watch the transit trackers, not the statements, for whether this becomes a Disrupted-tier halt.
We published five Week 28 calls on Monday, each with a pre-registered July 13 resolution source. We do not grade early and we never edit a published grade, so these stay formally open until Monday. But keeping score in public means saying, mid-week, where they stand after an event we did not have. Two have effectively broken against us.
This is the product working the way it is supposed to. We put probabilities on the table before the outcome, the world delivered an event that moved against two of them, and we are telling you so on the day rather than quietly revising the record on Monday. The grades still land July 13, against the sources we named, with no edits.
Follow it live on the Hormuz desk → Real-time wire, crisis score, market odds, and the full timeline. The record stays public, misses included. Day 130. — CS