Strait of Hormuz paralyzed six months into war; thousands of sailors stranded

For six months, the Strait of Hormuz — once the pulse point of a fifth of the world's energy trade — has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, as Iran's blockade has collapsed daily transits by 84 percent and left 6,000 sailors stranded in the Gulf with no clear passage home. What was once a corridor of routine commerce has fractured into competing routes: one sanctioned by Tehran along its own coastline, another shadowed by mine warnings along the Omani side, and a vast middle ground where ships vanish from tracking entirely. The human story behind the tonnage figures is one of ordinar