Iran's ambassador to France, Mohammad Amin Nejad, continues to be the only diplomat publicly describing an Iran-Oman bilateral toll arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz, and Oman's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Muscat has produced no document confirming any of it. The "permanent toll" framing — that Tehran would collect transit fees from vessels passing through its territorial waters, with Muscat as the cooperating coastal state on the southern shore — has been carried in Iranian state media as Iran's bilateral framework alongside the multilateral talks. [1] It exists, as of Monday morning, only as paraphrase: an Iranian ambassador's public characterization, repeated by Tasnim, reproduced inside Iranian-press coverage of the MOU framework. Muscat has signed nothing.

The Axios sixty-day MOU framework leaked Saturday includes Hormuz mine-clearing by Iran in exchange for U.S. port-blockade lifting and limited sanctions waivers, but does not name Oman as a coastal-state party to any toll. The paper's Sunday standard on the three Hormuz architecture claims read France's UN draft, the U.S.-Bahrain Council text, and Trump's Truth Social as three competing authorship claims with no votes. The Iran-Oman bilateral toll is a fourth claim, smaller and quieter, also with no signature. Kayhan's Saturday editorial demanding Iran "continue to collect transit fees from ships and vessels passing through our territorial waters" is the Tehran-side ideological floor underneath the ambassador's paraphrase. [1]

Oman's diplomatic posture matters because the sultanate has hosted previous indirect U.S.-Iran nuclear rounds and would be the obvious coastal-state counterparty for any binding toll instrument. The Omani foreign ministry's website carries no Sunday-into-Monday statement on Hormuz, no readout of any meeting with an Iranian principal, no comment on the MOU framework. Four claims about the post-war strait now exist publicly; only one has any document at all, and that document is a leaked framework that does not name Oman.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem