Hossein Shariatmadari, the Supreme Leader's representative at the Kayhan newspaper, published a signed column Sunday declaring that "the Strait of Hormuz is part of Iran's territorial waters and we retain the legal right to collect transit fees from ships and vessels passing through our territorial waters." [1] The column added, in a sentence aimed at Iran's own diplomats: "The United States also collects fees at maritime chokepoints." [1] It is the most explicit defense of the Hormuz toll Iran imposed last year that any Supreme-Leader-aligned outlet has published since the war ended.
The piece's target was internal. Shariatmadari named, without naming, "those Iranian negotiators ready to restore conditions in the strait to their prewar state after the conflict ends" and described their posture as a surrender of sovereignty disguised as diplomacy. [1] The negotiators in question include Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, who on the same Sunday morning told state broadcaster IRIB that Iran was "in the process of finalising these memorandums of understanding" in a "30 to 60 days" window. [2] One arm of the Iranian state spent Sunday morning explaining how the toll the paper has tracked since Day 1 — first imposed on oil cargoes, then on shipping, then on undersea cables — would be wound down. The other arm spent it explaining why the toll must stay.
Shariatmadari's authority makes the column more than newspaper polemic. He is the Supreme Leader's appointee, the Kayhan editorial line is read in Tehran as the closest thing to a public weather report from the Supreme National Security Council, and his signature on a piece is the institutional equivalent of a memo with Khamenei's office watermark. The column ran in the print edition and was distributed via Kayhan's social channels by 9 a.m. Tehran time. [1]
The Axios framework leaked Saturday evening describes the precise opposite of what Shariatmadari demands. Under the 60-day Memorandum of Understanding, Iran would "clear Hormuz mines so commercial shipping resumes" and the United States would lift its port blockade — a structure that returns the strait to civilian operation under what the document calls "relief for performance." [3] Nowhere in the leaked terms does Iran retain a transit-fee mechanism. Shariatmadari read the same leak the rest of the world did and wrote the response Sunday morning.
The contradiction surfaced in print is operational, not rhetorical. Iran in the year since the war began has built infrastructure around the toll — collection accounts at Bank Saderat, a designated tariff office at Bandar Abbas, a published rate schedule for vessels by tonnage class. Standing the toll down requires dismantling that infrastructure. Standing it up again, after the framework's 60-day window expires without resolution, requires keeping the staff in place. Shariatmadari is publishing on Day 1 of the wind-down to make sure the staff stays.
The Iranian opposition press in Europe has read the column as the Supreme Leader's office establishing deniability [4] — if Baghaei's Memorandum of Understanding fails, Khamenei's circle can say it never authorized it; if it succeeds, the circle can say it did not block it. Either outcome leaves the Supreme Leader's office uncommitted to a document the foreign ministry is signing. That is a familiar Iranian political form. It is also, on a Sunday when President Trump has claimed publicly that a deal is "largely negotiated," a public preparation by Tehran's most senior religious authority to reject the deal the foreign ministry is finalizing.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem