For the first time since the U.S.–Israel war with Iran began on Feb. 28, someone tried to get the seafarers out. Over several days in late June, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) launched an effort to evacuate the commercial vessels carrying thousands of seafarers who had been trapped in the Persian Gulf for almost four months by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With safety assurances in place, the operation brought 115 ships and about 2,500 crew through the Strait.
Then, on June 25 — ironically, the International Day of the Seafarer — a projectile struck the cargo ship Ever Lovely off Oman as it followed the route the IMO had prescribed. No one aboard was hurt, but that single attack was enough to halt the operation: the organization could no longer promise that the next ship would not be fired upon. Less than two weeks later, explosions were reported on Kharg Island and at Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island, and the United States revoked the waiver that had allowed Tehran to sell oil under a June 17 interim agreement, reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. Some 6,000 sailors remain stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. By the IMO’s count, at least 14 seafarers have been killed and more than 40 commercial vessels attacked since the war began.
Modern technology makes a merchant fleet’s neutrality more transparent than at any point in the history of naval warfare. Anyone with an iPhone can view global vessel data, because ships above a certain tonnage must keep an Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder activated whenever underway. AIS gives companies and governments a full picture of the maritime domain: a vessel’s civilian or warship character, its registry history, current owner contact information, crewmember identities and nationalities, cargo manifests, and past and planned ports of call, to name only a few of the viewable data fields. The system was designed for the safety and security of shipping — and it also simplifies a warship’s task of evaluating a vessel to determine its character.
Governments have even more data. Long-Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) is an international, satellite-based system that lets authorities track ships worldwide in near real time with classified information; mandatory under the SOLAS Convention, it requires applicable vessels to transmit their identity and position at least four times a day. Combine LRIT with AIS and mandatory flag-state registration — searchable online worldwide — and suspicious activity surfaces quickly, arming a warship’s captain with substantial information before deciding whether to board. Proximity close enough to board and ship-to-ship VHF radio contact provide a firmer basis still, either for boarding or for recognizing a vessel’s neutrality. English is the international language of shipping and is required aboard nearly every commercial vessel a warship would contemplate boarding in an armed conflict — that is, not small fishing or recreational craft.
During this conflict, the technology provides up-to-date details concerning shipping in the Strait of Hormuz: the stranded seafarers have overwhelmingly been aboard ships of neutral nations, many with third-state crews and owners who have taken no part in any aspect of the U.S.–Iran confrontation.
In peacetime, what strands mariners is usually the opposite problem — deliberate opacity. A vessel’s ownership or charter may be falsely broadcast on AIS, or the transponder switched off altogether, a practice known as spoofing. Ships registered by nations with lax safety and security laws are sometimes simply abandoned in bankruptcy. In either case, the crew can be left aboard with no viable recourse for rescue, repatriation, or wages.
The Law of the Sea
In the current armed conflict with Iran, the United States paused its naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz to ease the backup of vessels and return them safely to their voyages. But the law of the sea should have guaranteed the Ever Lovely‘s safe transit regardless of any pause.
Articles 37 through 44 of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) establish the right of transit passage for all ships and aircraft through straits used for international navigation. All vessels — including warships and submarines — enjoy freedom of navigation and overflight for the purpose of continuous, expeditious, and unimpeded transit. The regime applies where a strait connects one part of the high seas or an Exclusive Economic Zone to another.
Articles 17 through 26 govern innocent passage, a slightly more restrictive regime designed to protect the coastal state. To be innocent, passage must be continuous and expeditious; usually it involves ships traversing the territorial sea or proceeding to or from port. Warships also have this right and are covered by these provisions as well. Ships must keep moving, though stopping and anchoring are permitted when incidental to ordinary navigation, necessitated by force majeure, or undertaken to render assistance to persons or ships in distress. There are several ways passage can stop being innocent. More generally, they cite actions that are contrary to a coastal state’s customs, fiscal, sanitization, or pollution laws. They also prohibit activities a warship may normally conduct on the high seas. For instance, a warship collecting intelligence from the coastal state or holding weapons training or launching devices, to name a few activities, stop innocent passage.
Coastal states also may not hamper or suspend innocent passage in their territorial seas, nor levy charges for the right of passage. They may take necessary steps to prevent passage that is not innocent and may temporarily suspend innocent passage in specified areas when essential to their security.
The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean. At its narrowest, the strait is roughly 21 miles wide, so the territorial seas of Iran and Oman overlap completely: ships must pass through their territorial waters to fully transit the Strait. Even a wartime blockade —not in effect at the time of the Ever Lovely strike — should not have denied safe passage to any of the neutral merchant vessels waiting in the queue.
The Maritime Labour Convention, in effect a bill of rights for seafarers, requires owners to repatriate their crews and forbids abandonment — but not in wartime. For companies that would ordinarily bring mariners ashore, the threat of attack looms. The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations (NWP 1-14M) addresses the legal status, protection, and treatment of civilian mariners during armed conflict. While it does not provide exhaustive, day-to-day administrative instructions for repatriation, it outlines the overarching principles of international law regarding their release and repatriation. Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration’s military strikes on vessels allegedly ferrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, has sparked new debates on the issue.
A Larger Problem
The problem is far larger than any single armed conflict. At the height of Somali piracy, in January 2011, 710 seafarers were held hostage aboard 31 vessels; the last were not freed until October 2016. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in September 2020, roughly 400,000 were stranded at sea, unable to be relieved or repatriated. In 2024 alone, owners abandoned 3,133 seafarers aboard a record 312 vessels — nearly twice as many as the year before.
Whether the cause is disaster, blockade, or contagious disease, the effects are global and accelerate rapidly once shipping stalls. The joint IMO–International Labour Organization database on abandonment, maintained with the support of the International Ship Suppliers’ Association (ISSA), has logged 1,145 such cases affecting 16,569 seafarers over two decades — most in the past five years, as a growing “shadow fleet” of tankers gravitates to the registries that, not coincidentally, are least able to protect a crew. The flags that enable sanctions evasion are, predictably, the ones most willing to walk away from their mariners in a crisis. In the maritime industry, abandonment means a shipowner’s failure to pay wages, leaving a crew without provisions, or refusing to pay for repatriation.
In the current war with Iran, many mariners have been underway since February, long past the end of their contracts. These are civilians caught in the crossfire, not combatants. According to maritime expert Sal Mercogliano, at least five U.S.-flagged merchant vessels remain in the region with more than 100 Americans aboard, facing mounting difficulty securing safe resupply, maintaining communications, and identifying a viable transit plan. Industry groups increasingly describe the situation as a humanitarian crisis, with thousands of seafarers across the region stranded aboard vessels as ports restrict access and security risks escalate. On one tanker diverted during the blockade, a young officer died awaiting medical evacuation; his body lay aboard for two days. He was stranded — and stranding, increasingly, is how the sea takes its toll on merchant mariners.
Though invisible to most Americans, merchant mariners are the labor behind the supply chain. The BIMCO/ICS Seafarer Workforce Report estimates the global workforce at 1.89 million seafarers operating more than 74,000 internationally trading merchant vessels. More than 80 percent of goods traded worldwide move by sea — 12.7 billion tons in 2024 — and at that scale there is no alternative: the crude and refined fuel that run economies, the iron ore, coal, and grain that feed industry, and the containers of manufactured goods bound for store shelves all travel on commercial ships, worked by crews. The Strait of Hormuz alone carried some 20 million barrels of oil a day before the war — more than a quarter of all seaborne oil trade and about a fifth of world oil consumption, along with roughly a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas.
When a ship is delayed, diverted, or disabled, the effect ripples through the system; within weeks, freight rates skyrocket, as do fuel prices and the cost of household goods. National and economic security rely on dependable supply chains. The people who move this cargo are indispensable to the global economy, yet largely invisible. When conflict erupts, their personal risk rises quickly. They face not only injury or death from missile and drone attacks but also future harms: being stranded with limited food and supplies, cut off from communications, unpaid, or abandoned outright by unscrupulous owners who leave the problem to authorities already scrambling to manage a wider crisis.
This is not principally an American fleet problem — which is precisely why it is an American problem. The United States owns or operates roughly 2.5 percent of the world’s carrying capacity measured in deadweight tonnage, and the U.S. Merchant Marine now accounts for about 0.2 percent of the world’s vessels. Some 97 percent of U.S. international maritime trade by volume moves on foreign-flagged ships. The mariners most in need of protection sail aboard the foreign-flagged vessels we rely upon for global trade to keep the economy strong.
The Minimal Role of Force
The IMO is responsible for securing and safeguarding the maritime domain and its seafarers, but it has no police force. Compliance depends on the leverage built into treaties and conventions and on the diplomacy that backs them. The Maritime Labour Convention and the STCW Convention (Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping) have protected seafarers in many respects — but not in stranding situations, and least of all in wartime.
Force is not a clean substitute. A military could in principle extract its own flagged vessels and mariners from the Strait, but this is not merely a matter of applying force. The U.S. military’s Central Command for the broader Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia (CENTCOM) may have the capability to extract U.S. vessels and personnel; it would not be a simple mission, and the Navy has not done so as of this writing.
In some scenarios, carrying weapons and security personnel aboard civilian merchant vessels makes sense — combating piracy chief among them. Merchant ships have long carried weapons and trained Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel (PCASP) to be aboard for the predictably dangerous transits, with weapons and regulations controlled by the coastal states’ domestic laws and interpretations. The IMO recognized PCASP as an option during an uptick in piracy in 2008-2009, when Navies could no longer protect their fleets from attack. Flag states manage their own PCASP regulations and requirements. The Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) of the IMO has issued and still issues numerous advisories on safe PCASP employment, based upon usage data. Some Coastal states have procedures for the weapons and requirements for Security Team licensing. Other states prohibit them entirely— Egypt, Nigeria, and India among them. Their governments exercise strict sovereign jurisdiction to bar all private weapons from their territorial waters under any civilian circumstances. The UAE and Saudi Arabia stop short of an outright ban but impose extensive regulations and notification requirements that deter carriage.
To date, security has been arranged and paid for by the maritime industry for its own vessels. The U.S. military has not accepted a mission or obligation to arm the U.S. merchant fleet. Military Sealift Command (an auxiliary to the U.S. Navy in times of war) cargo vessels are unarmed and would rely on PCASP if needed; other MSC vessels, also crewed by civilian mariners or contractors, carry small arms, shotguns, and/or rifles for self-defense, force protection, and to counter piracy, with special training for their crewmembers.
Arming merchant vessels — with private or military weapons, or with security teams — has proven most effective against pirates, and the hull insurance requirements in dangerous waters are effective motivators. But arming merchant ships would not have prevented the stranding caused by the closures of the Strait of Hormuz, nor would it help mariners left to fend for themselves. Stranding and abandonment cases are generally not violent.
There is ample authority to keep mariners safe during wars and in times of peace. Yet outside of piracy, the risk of stranding and abandonment persists — on armed and unarmed vessels — because enforcement is either not feasible, as in the Strait of Hormuz, or simply not attempted, which accounts for most cases.
Giving Mandates More ‘Teeth’
Three mechanisms could give the mandates already in place some teeth.
The first is pre-negotiated routing agreements. The IMO supports establishing pre-approved, legally binding routes through neutral waters before a crisis, rather than improvising them mid-conflict. Such blueprints set out exactly how trapped crews are processed, how routing data is shared, and how navigation systems are managed during a localized blockade. The clearest success came in the Black Sea after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the European Union, Romania, and Bulgaria shifted trade away from the combat zone, used territorial seas where needed, and linked the Danube River to a safe ocean route into the deep-water ports of Constanța in Romania and Varna in Bulgaria. The Strait of Hormuz is the counterexample — the June U.S.-Oman-Iran memorandum of understanding is non-binding and has depended entirely on Iran’s willingness to abide by it at any given moment.
The second potential mechanism for strengthening existing mandates would be coalitions rather than unilateral action. Unilateral self-defense is lawful but not always effective. Formal regional or international coalitions with firm commitments are easier to assemble before military action than after it. U.N. Security Council resolutions authorizing multinational naval coalitions supply a legitimacy no single nation’s agenda can establish, and regional protocols for mine-clearing, drone defense, and vessel escorts — negotiated before violence erupts — mitigate the risk of escalation into a wider war.
The third is compulsory war-risk insurance. Adding provisions to existing safety and liability conventions that mandate war-risk coverage in commercial cargo and hull insurance would make compliance a commercial necessity. If a coastal state violated safe-corridor laws (i.e., transit and innocent passage), global insurers could collectively declare its waters an uninsurable zone — economically paralyzing that state’s own shipping and trade. PCASP backed by separately issued short-term war coverage policies for dangerous waters do not have that kind of reach. Governments do not have the leverage to hold other countries or companies accountable for stranded mariners in the same way that they would be incentivized to do if compulsory war-risk insurance were included in current plans.
The machinery already exists in embryo. The Joint War Committee — underwriters from Lloyd’s of London and other marine hull insurers in the London market, which receive independent advice on higher-risk regions — currently includes the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Black Sea, and Red Sea as war-risk areas. Global insurers have, in practice, suspended underwriting for Hormuz during this crisis. The market can already render dangerous waters effectively uninsurable; the question is whether that power is ever pointed at the companies and states that strand crews.
These seafarers who move the world’s commerce are virtually invisible; when they stop, Americans and others feel it soon enough — at the gas pump and on grocery shelves. The men and women who are the lifeblood of global trade should not be left stranded at sea indefinitely, the unseen and undeserving victims of other people’s wars or financial disasters.
