Iran's five-month war with the US and Israel is edging toward a negotiated pause over the Strait of Hormuz even as its side effects keep spreading — with Yemen's Houthis hitting Saudi Arabia's energy infrastructure twice in 24 hours and a still-unclaimed drone strike reaching as far as a refinery in Libya.

Three threads are currently running in parallel: a genuine, if heavily caveated, diplomatic opening over Hormuz; a US naval blockade that keeps tightening even as those talks proceed; and a regional military campaign against energy-infrastructure, mainly by Iran-aligned Houthi forces but now also touching targets as far away as North Africa, that the brand-new Mecca Treaty defence pact did nothing to prevent.

Hormuz reopening still hostage to US concessions

Iran and Oman are “very close” to an agreement on a new shipping route through Hormuz, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on August 8, but he and Iran's Revolutionary Guard were emphatic that a deal on shipping mechanics is not the same as reopening the strait itself.

The Guard's spokesperson, Hossein Mohebbi, said reopening “has nothing to do with the negotiations between Iran and Oman” and is conditional instead on the US accepting Iran's own terms — which Iran's Supreme National Security Council has spelled out as an end to threats against Iran, a permanent end to the war with Iran and its regional allies, especially important is the lifting of the naval blockade and all sanctions, as well as the release of frozen Iranian assets, and compensation for war damage.

US Vice President JD Vance said on August 8 that Iran has told Washington it has “no plans” to charge tolls for transit — an apparent climbdown from Tehran's earlier insistence on fees — and that the two sides had made “some progress,” with talks now focused on maximising the oil and gas able to move through the strait.

IntelliNews sources in Moscow say that the US actually has no problem with transit fees as the US itself will be largely unaffected by any money charged for transiting the straits as it imports little from the Gulf. China and Europe are have a bigger problem with fees, worried that it will cause a “contagion” to other global chokepoints.

But the diplomacy is unfolding against a backdrop of continued violence: the United Arab Emirates said Iran struck another tanker in the strait with a missile even as the talks proceeded, and Oman condemned the strike while insisting the “positive and constructive” negotiations continue regardless. As IntelliNews reported earlier this month, the US, Iran and Oman were already nearing an interim deal — progress that has still not translated into an end to attacks on shipping.

The blockade tightens as talks continue

The US Navy's blockade of Iranian ports, reinstated on July 14 after a ceasefire collapsed, has now redirected 53 commercial vessels attempting to enter or exit Iran, disabled two and boarded another two, US Central Command said on August 8 — up from 51 the previous day. The first phase of the blockade, which ran from April 14 to June 18, had redirected more than 140 ships in nine weeks, suggesting the current phase is running at a markedly slower pace. CENTCOM said it has also let through more than 30 vessels carrying humanitarian aid, a figure it does not disclose on a regular basis.

A defence pact that lasted 48 hours

Saudi Arabia's response to the war's spillover has been to build alliances rather than rely on Washington alone: on August 7 it signed a defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan in Mecca, described by Turkish officials as functionally equivalent to Nato's Article 5 mutual-defence clause.

The pact lasted barely two days as a deterrent. On August 9, Houthi forces struck Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery — a 400,000 b/d facility already knocked offline once before by an earlier Houthi attack in late July, as IntelliNews reported at the time. Saudi's energy ministry said the resulting fire was extinguished with no injuries; Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the strike was retaliation for Saudi drone incursions into Yemen's Saada and Hajjah provinces.

Hours earlier, the Houthis had hit an even larger target: Aramco's Berri gas plant in Jubail, one of Saudi Arabia's largest gas-processing facilities, triggering a blaze that satellite fire-detection data put at roughly 125 megawatts of radiative power — among the more intense fires open-source analysts have recorded at a Saudi energy site this year. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan intervened or was reported present in the aftermath of either strike, undercutting the new pact's credibility within days of its signing.

Strikes on Aramco's energy infrastructure have become a recurring feature of the war's fifth month, as Iran and its regional allies keep targeting Saudi and Gulf energy sites and shipping in the fallout from the US and Israeli attack on Iran that started the war on February 28.

The war's energy fallout reaches Libya

The war's energy-infrastructure fallout has now reached North Africa too. A drone crashed into an untreated-naphtha tank at Libya's Zawia oil refinery, on the Mediterranean coast, early on August 8, causing a leak that staff managed to control, the refinery's operating company said, according to oil analyst Giovanni Staunovo.

There were no fires or casualties, but the operator warned of the danger posed by military equipment operating near the site. No attribution has been given for the drone — whose forces, what type, deliberate strike or stray/crash — and Libya's own fractured security situation, split between rival armed factions with no connection to the Iran war, makes the incident's cause genuinely ambiguous rather than a clear extension of the Gulf conflict.

In a separate, unrelated Libyan energy incident the same week, Waha Oil, a joint venture between Libya's National Oil Corp, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips, said on August 8 it had contained a routine pipeline leak on its Zaqout-Sidra line, discovered during an inspection rather than caused by any attack, and had resumed pumping within a day. Waha normally produces 340,000-400,000 b/d.

The two incidents — one an unattributed drone strike, the other a mechanical leak — are unconnected, but both point to how exposed North Africa's ageing, conflict-adjacent energy infrastructure has become even at the margins of a war fought over a different stretch of coastline entirely.

A war winding down and escalating at once

Taken together, the last 48 hours capture where the Iran war actually stands five months in: closer to a negotiated arrangement over Hormuz than at any point since the fighting began, but still producing fresh attacks on tankers, refineries and gas plants across three countries even as the diplomacy proceeds — a war winding down and escalating at the same time, depending on which thread of it is being watched.