UN starts plan to evacuate 11,000 seafarers through Hormuz
The UN shipping agency said Tuesday it has begun an operation to move hundreds of ships and about 11,000 stranded seafarers out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz after the United States and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding.
The International Maritime Organization said it had obtained safety guarantees and verified conditions for safe navigation. “We have now started contacting the ships to start the evacuation,” an IMO spokesperson said, without giving a timeline.
IMO chief Arsenio Dominguez said the operation would be carried out “in close cooperation with Iran, Oman, all other coastal states in the region, the United States and the maritime industry.”
Oman’s defense ministry said the phased plan was necessary because of the “elevated risk of collision,” adding that the regular Traffic Separation Scheme was “not safe for use at this time.” Floating mines remain a major risk around Hormuz.
Vessel crossings through the Strait of Hormuz nearly tripled week-on-week, MarineTraffic said in a post on X, citing its own data and figures from Kpler.
Confirmed crossings through one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints rose from 32 vessels on June 12–14 to 93 vessels on June 19–21, an increase of 61 crossings compared with the previous weekend.
The sharpest rise came on Saturday, when crossings jumped from just 3 vessels to 42 week-on-week.
MarineTraffic said the rebound followed recent diplomatic developments and a temporary OFAC general license, which has eased immediate compliance uncertainty around approved Hormuz transits until August 21.
A US F-15 pilot shot down over Iran in April told intelligence officials he saw multiple Iranian drones hovering and moving together in a “jellyfish” formation before ejecting, CNN reported, citing four sources familiar with his debriefing.
One source said the pilot described “multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” calling it “real alien sh*t.” Another said he reported seeing a “minefield of drones” in the air.
The account triggered debate inside the US intelligence community over whether Iran had demonstrated an advanced drone capability known as “one-to-many meshed networking,” or whether the pilot’s concussion, crash trauma or battlefield conditions may have distorted his recollection.
Debriefers reportedly asked, “Are you sure you saw what you are saying you saw?” CNN said the exact cause of the F-15 downing remains under investigation.
Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday that Israel smuggled Starlink internet receivers into Iran to help anti-government protesters maintain internet access.
Speaking at the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem, Bennett said he had launched a plan to acquire and covertly transfer “tens of thousands” of Starlink receivers into Iran.
However, Bennett said the effort was not fully pursued after he left office, criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government for failing to follow through on the initiative.
File photo of people queue at an ATM in an Iranian city as customers seek access to banking services.
At least eight Iranian banks suffered widespread service disruptions on Tuesday, leaving customers unable to access many electronic and card-based services days after a separate outage affected four major banks.
Customers told Iran International that services at Pasargad, Melli, Mellat, Sepah, Tejarat, Saderat, Tose’e Ta’avon and Resalat banks were severely disrupted on Tuesday with reports indicating that almost all services had become unavailable.
Some domestic media outlets also confirmed the disruptions. ILNA news agency reported that parts of Iran's banking systems had experienced outages and slowdowns since Tuesday morning.
The Informatics Services Corporation later pointed to cyberattacks as the cause of the latest problems.
“The Informatics Services Corporation has temporarily taken card-based services offline to prevent any unauthorized access and safeguard customers’ data and assets,” the company said in a statement.
Customers wait at a bank branch in Iran as staff process transactions at service counters.
Outages follow earlier attack
The disruption comes after electronic services at Melli, Tejarat, Saderat and Tose’e Saderat banks were hit by major outages on June 13.
Those problems affected mobile banking, internet banking, automated teller machines, point-of-sale terminals and other card services.
A day later, the Coordination Council of Banks said the outage resulted from a “limited cyberattack” targeting communications infrastructure shared by the four lenders. The council said no unauthorized access to customer data had occurred and no information had been deleted.
Meysam Zohourian, a member of parliament’s Economic Committee, later warned that a full restoration of services could take up to two weeks.
“Despite investigations by various bodies, the origin and cause of the main attack have not yet been identified, and even replacing hardware has not solved the problem,” Zohourian wrote on X.
A customer speaks with a bank teller at a branch in Iran.
Infrastructure under scrutiny
Zohourian also criticized the role of the Informatics Services Corporation, which provides key banking and payment infrastructure and is partly owned by the Central Bank and several commercial lenders.
Iran’s banking sector has faced repeated service outages in recent years, many of them linked to cyberattacks. Such disruptions have become more common during periods of conflict and heightened security concerns, raising questions about the resilience of the country’s financial infrastructure.
The US-Iran memorandum is being implemented before Washington and Tehran have agreed what it means, turning the fragile deal into a battle over interpretation across the Strait of Hormuz, frozen funds, nuclear inspections, oil sanctions and Lebanon.
Less than a week after the two sides signed the MoU to end more than three months of war, its contradictions are already shaping the next phase of diplomacy: Hormuz is open, but ships may still need Iranian permission; funds are “available,” but Washington says they may be channeled toward wheat, corn and other approved purchases; inspectors are “back,” according to US officials, but Iran says there is no plan for UN inspectors to visit bombed nuclear sites; oil sales have been authorized, but Vice President JD Vance says Tehran will not benefit unless it changes behavior; Lebanon is written into the deal, but Israel is not a party to it.
For Iran, ambiguity has become leverage. Officials in Tehran are insisting that implementation of the MoU’s early provisions is a precondition for talks on more sensitive issues, while rejecting US descriptions of what the next stage should include.
