Two Indian LPG tankers slipped through the Strait of Hormuz at dawn on Saturday. No warships escorted them. No coalition of the willing cleared their path. A phone call did — between Prime Minister Modi and Iranian President Pezeshkian, followed by three conversations between their foreign ministers in a single week. For Israel, which has staked its long-term economic architecture on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor running through Haifa, the implications of that phone call deserve more attention than the tankers themselves.

Since Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February, Iran has converted the Strait of Hormuz from a maritime commons into a political sorting mechanism. Foreign Minister Araghchi’s formula is brutally simple: the strait is open to all except ‘enemies’ and their allies. The IRGC’s 10 March escalation went further — offering ‘unrestricted passage’ to any country that expels Israeli and American ambassadors. This is energy access weaponised as a diplomatic loyalty test, dividing the world into those who may transit Hormuz and those who may not. India, through sheer weight of relationship, has placed itself on the permitted side of that line. Brent crude has surged past $104. The IEA calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. And India’s 333 million LPG-dependent households can still cook dinner.

The contrast with Washington’s approach could hardly be starker. Trump has called on China, France, and the United Kingdom to send warships. Japan says dispatch faces high legal hurdles. Europe is deliberating whether to extend the Aspides naval mission from the Red Sea. India, meanwhile, achieved with diplomatic capital what a carrier strike group has not: actual cargo moving through the strait. Jaishankar told reporters in Brussels that the talks had ‘yielded some results,’ adding with characteristic understatement that ‘India and Iran have a relationship.’ That relationship has a name, an address, and a twenty-year history that is now collapsing in real time.

The name is Chabahar. Located on Iran’s southeastern coast, just outside the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman, the port has been the centrepiece of India’s westward connectivity ambitions since 2003. The vision was always sweeping: Chabahar as India’s gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan entirely, and forming the southern anchor of the 7,200-kilometre International North-South Transport Corridor linking Mumbai to Moscow. The 2016 trilateral agreement between India, Iran, and Afghanistan formalised this ambition. In May 2024, India Ports Global Limited signed a ten-year lease to operate the Shahid Beheshti terminal, committing $120 million in direct investment plus a $250 million credit line. The Chabahar-Zahedan railway — a line of more than 600 kilometres connecting the port to Iran’s national rail network near the Afghan border, built by the IRGC’s construction arm — had reached eighty-four per cent completion by October 2025. Iran’s transport ministry was targeting March 2026 for the line to go operational. It would have given landlocked Central Asia its shortest route to the open sea.

None of that will happen now. The war has struck at every pillar of the Chabahar project simultaneously, and the forensic details tell the story of a strategic exit disguised as a pause. In January 2026, India transferred its entire $120 million commitment to Iran ahead of schedule — not as a vote of confidence, but as a pre-emptive liquidation of liabilities before the sanctions window closed. Government directors at India Ports Global resigned en masse when Washington first signalled the waiver’s revocation in September 2025. The company’s website was taken down to, in the words of one official, ‘insulate everybody associated with the port from potential sanctions.’ Operational control has been handed to Iranian personnel. India’s 2026-27 budget slashed the Chabahar allocation to zero. The US sanctions waiver permitting Indian operations expires on 26 April; no renewal is plausible amid active hostilities. Chatham House’s Chietigj Bajpaee assesses that the Chabahar-Zahedan railway now faces ‘indefinite delays’ as Iran pivots from civil engineering to wartime mobilisation. The IRGC engineers laying three and a half kilometres of track per day last autumn are presumably occupied elsewhere.

For Israel, Chabahar’s collapse should be read as both opportunity and warning. The opportunity is obvious: IMEC’s principal competitor is dead. As RAND economist Rafiq Dossani told CNBC, ‘If Israel and the US win, IMEC will likely be Israel’s preference over the revival of Chabahar.’ With the northern route through Iran now a dead end — whether Tehran falls under harsher sanctions or emerges too weakened to sustain infrastructure megaprojects — IMEC becomes the only plausible corridor connecting Indian manufacturing to European consumption via the Middle East. Haifa’s port, designated as IMEC’s Mediterranean gateway, stands to become one of the most strategically significant nodes in twenty-first-century global trade.

The warning is that the same war killing Chabahar is also wounding IMEC. This is the paradox that corridor planners in Jerusalem must confront. Drones have struck Oman’s deep-water ports of Duqm and Salalah — the very facilities designed as Hormuz bypass routes for IMEC’s eastern maritime leg. Insurance premiums for Gulf shipping have soared. Gulf producers have shut in ten million barrels per day of capacity. In the language of systems theory, the war has triggered what Le Chatelier’s Principle would predict: a shock to one part of an interconnected network propagates through the entire system, producing secondary disruptions that are harder to contain than the original event. IMEC’s architects assumed a stable Gulf as a precondition. The Hormuz closure has revealed that assumption as the corridor’s single point of failure. You cannot build a trade route premised on Middle Eastern stability through a war that demonstrates the opposite.

India’s behaviour through this crisis reveals a harder truth about transaction costs in corridor diplomacy. New Delhi is simultaneously winding down its institutional presence in Iran, maintaining back-channel goodwill with Tehran for emergency energy access, keeping faith with the IMEC consortium for long-term connectivity, securing a US waiver to purchase sanctioned Russian crude as a Gulf hedge, and directing refineries to maximise domestic LPG production. This is not strategic confusion. It is the rational response of a country that has learned the most expensive lesson in infrastructure geopolitics: the transaction costs of locking into a single corridor are catastrophic when the corridor runs through a conflict zone. India will participate in IMEC. But it will never again bet everything on one route, one partner, or one strait.

Key Players and Their Positions on the Strait of Hormuz Crisis

Note: Positions are fluid and subject to rapid change as the conflict evolves. ‘IMEC Stake’ reflects each actor’s strategic interest in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Sources: Financial Times, IEA, CNBC, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, MEA India, IRGC (via IRIB), Wikipedia, USNI News, Lloyd’s List.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)