Five Iranian Ships Have Crossed the U.S. Naval Blockade. The Formal Deal Has Not Been Signed Yet.

Since Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding on June 16, five Iranian-flagged vessels have passed through the U.S. naval blockade zone without obstruction before the agreement has been formally signed.

TankerTrackers.com confirmed the movements via satellite imagery corroborated with AIS tracking data. Two National Iranian Tanker Company supertankers, the DIONA (IMO 9569695) and HERO2 (IMO 9362073), exited the blockade perimeter carrying a combined 3.8 million barrels of crude oil. A third tanker followed. According to CBS News, the remaining two vessels were a bulk carrier and a container ship that departed Iran's southern port of Chabahar and appeared to be heading east.

The signing ceremony is scheduled for Friday at Switzerland's Bürgenstock resort, according to Daily Sabah. Negotiations over Iran's nuclear program and a broader sanctions framework are then set to run through a 60-day window beginning after the signing.

What Trump Actually Said Wednesday Morning

There is a significant wrinkle. Speaking to reporters in Canada at the G7 meeting Wednesday, Trump said the memorandum of understanding is NOT final. According to CBS News, he told reporters: "if I don't like it, we'll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head. If I don't like it, if they don't behave, we'll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head."

Trump also told reporters the deal does not include immediate sanctions relief for Iran and that he would clarify the matter at a later date.

That directly contradicts the Wall Street Journal's Tuesday report, which cited unnamed people familiar with the agreement saying that a waiver covering oil sales, banking, shipping, and insurance would take effect immediately upon signing. OilPrice.com reported that the breadth of that sanctions relief—covering the entire supply chain, not just crude exports—is what makes it commercially actionable from day one.

Either the WSJ's sources had it right and Trump is walking it back under pressure, or the deal's sanctions terms were never settled and the reporting got ahead of the facts. That question will not be answered until the text of the agreement is released.

What the Ships Actually Represent

The tanker movements matter beyond symbolism. Iran holds some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves and was producing over 3 million barrels per day before the conflict began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Tehran on February 28, according to OilPrice.com. That production has been choked off by sanctions, wartime infrastructure damage, and the naval blockade.

Even the early signs of resumption moved markets. Oil prices fell on news the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Commercial traffic through the strait remains drastically below normal: CBS News reported that vessels transiting the Strait were in the single digits on Wednesday, compared to a historic average of around 135 per day. Shipping firms told CBS News they need explicit security guarantees and legal clarity before resuming normal operations.

The Conservative Objection Deserves to Be Stated Fairly

Some Senate Republicans have raised substantive concerns about the agreement. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, said: "Let's look at it and see what it actually is." Republicans on Capitol Hill have reportedly requested the full text of the agreement and administration briefings.

The core concern is that Iran gets immediate, tangible economic relief—oil revenue—while the most consequential issue, the fate of its nuclear program, gets deferred to a 60-day negotiation window that hasn't started yet. That is the same structural problem critics identified with the 2015 JCPOA: frontloading the concessions while backloading the verification. Whether this deal avoids that trap depends entirely on terms that have not been made public.

The administration's counter-argument is that stopping an active war and reopening one of the world's most critical shipping chokepoints is itself a substantial deliverable, and that a prolonged blockade was imposing real costs on global energy markets and U.S. allies.

Israel Is Not Cooperating

Adding pressure to the timeline, Israel has continued carrying out strikes in Lebanon since the deal was announced. Trump criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly, calling the strikes "vicious" and "too much," according to CBS News. Iran has said continued Israeli military presence in Lebanon would constitute a violation of the agreement.

That creates a direct link between Israeli military decisions and the durability of the U.S.-Iran accord. The Trump administration appears to have not fully locked down this dependency before announcing the deal.

The unresolved question going into Friday is narrow but critical: when the agreement is actually signed at Bürgenstock, will it include the immediate, supply-chain-wide sanctions relief the Wall Street Journal described, or will Trump's Wednesday walk-back hold, deferring relief to a later date? The answer determines whether those five tankers represent the beginning of Iranian oil returning to global markets or a premature crossing that gets reversed.