Oman's Foreign Ministry page still shows April 4 talks with Iran on possible options for smooth passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but not a May 18 confirmation of Iran's claimed bilateral Strait regime. [1]

Sunday's paper held that Oman stayed silent while Iran wrote the Strait rules. Monday's update is the same kind of evidence: Muscat spoke, but not in the way Tehran's claim requires.

The April Omani statement is narrow. It says undersecretaries and specialists from Oman and Iran met, discussed possible options for ensuring smooth passage through the Strait during regional circumstances, and presented perspectives and proposals that would be studied. [1] It does not say Oman approved a toll, a joint authority, a clearance list, an insurance protocol or Iranian rules for transit.

That distinction is not lawyerly fuss. In the Hormuz story, nouns are policy. A meeting is not an agreement. Options are not implementation. Proposals to be studied are not bilateral consent.

The May 18 page deepens the absence because Oman's site had live regional statements: condemnations of an attempt to target Saudi Arabia with drones and of an attack on a nuclear power plant in the UAE appeared in the recent statements list. [1] Muscat was not asleep. It simply did not use those statements, or the April record, to bless Tehran's version of Strait management.

MSM often treats silence as a pause between visible events. X treats silence as a code to be broken. The paper treats it as evidence only when the promised artifact is missing. Iran's side has described mechanisms. The Omani record available here has not made them bilateral.

That keeps the Strait in the category it occupied Sunday: an operating claim with no matching Omani public instrument. The next thing that would change the story is clear. Muscat could confirm joint management, deny it, narrow it to safety talks, or publish a technical notice. Until then, Iran's claim remains Iranian-side language.

The danger is that repetition does the work of confirmation. A phrase enters shipping discourse, then market commentary, then diplomatic summary, and soon a unilateral proposal looks like a regional arrangement. The April statement resists that inflation. It says talks happened. It does not say the rulebook exists.

That is why the May 18 absence belongs in the paper. In a crisis where tankers, insurers and governments price every word, not saying yes is also a document.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem