The International Maritime Organization confirmed the number on Tuesday: approximately 2,000 vessels and 20,000 seafarers are trapped in or near the Strait of Hormuz. The ships are not sunk. The water is not blocked. But the mines are real, the risk is real, and the rerouting is real — and it has produced a human crisis that the conflict's architects did not plan for.

CNN published video from the region on Friday showing the scale of the stranding. [1] Docked or anchored vessels stretch across photographs of the strait like a maritime traffic jam that no traffic controller can dissolve. The International Transport Workers' Federation put the figure at 20,000 seafarers on March 24, with no resolution in sight. [2]

The Institute for the Study of War confirmed the mining picture on March 24: Iran has deployed at least a dozen Maham 3 and Maham 7 naval mines in the strait. [3] The Maham 3 is a moored mine equipped with magnetic and acoustic sensors. The Maham 7 is a bottom-nyed mine designed to rest on the seabed and detonate when a vessel passes directly overhead. Both are Iranian-manufactured. Both are effective. And both have turned a critical shipping lane into a de facto no-go zone for any commercial operator unwilling to accept the risk.

Seven crew members have died in attacks on commercial vessels. Eighteen ships have been hit. Iran's letter to the United Nations claiming the strait remains open for navigation is the legal position of a government that has also planted mines in the shipping lane. [4] Both things are true simultaneously: the strait is open in theory and closed in practice.

The seafarers are caught between two governments that have made the strait a battlefield. They did not choose this war. They are not flag bearers for anyone's policy. They are crane operators, engineers, galley workers, deckhands — civilians whose employment contract has become a sentence.

The rerouting has begun. Major carriers have started diverting vessels via the Cape of Good Hope, adding 12 to 15 days to every voyage. [5] The cost differential: an additional $3 to $5 per barrel, according to shipping analysts. [6] That is the price of avoiding the minefield. But rerouting is not an option for the 20,000 people already stranded aboard vessels that cannot proceed and cannot return. They wait. The water is still clean. The food is finite. The port of escape is not yet visible.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem