The Strait of Hormuz War Has Run Six Months. Here's What It's Done to Gold and Oil Prices
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran under what the Pentagon named Operation Epic Fury. The strikes killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Iran responded with missile attacks on Israel and on US bases across the Gulf, and began attacking commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the 34-kilometre passage between Iran and Oman that roughly 20% of the world's seaborne oil and 20% of its liquefied natural gas moves through.
Six months later, the war has not stopped. As of 21 August, 19 mariners have died in 74 tracked attacks on commercial vessels since the fighting began, according to the International Maritime Organization, reported by USNI News. Ships have been sunk, abandoned and captured. Two seafarers were killed in the ten days before that count, on the MV Minoan Dignity and the MV Riyan Star, with a third missing after an earlier attack on the MV Minoan Pioneer.
That is the story behind the gold and oil headlines this week. It deserves to be stated plainly rather than folded into a line about "renewed tension."
Where the talks stand
A ceasefire in April was followed by a memorandum of understanding on 17 June, setting a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent settlement, including reopening the strait. That window closed on 17 August without a deal. President Trump ruled out extending the truce, and a senior Iranian official told Reuters the same day that Tehran had shifted from a defensive posture to what it called a "fully offensive" one, aimed at breaking the US Navy's blockade of Iranian ports.
Shipping has adapted rather than stopped. Traffic through the strait fell close to zero in the first weeks of the war, then partly recovered. Lloyd's List Intelligence tracked 73 transits in the week to 21 August, against a pre-war weekly average many multiples higher. Maritime analysts describe this as a core group of shipowners who have decided to keep operating and priced in the risk, not a sign the danger has passed.
What it did to prices at the start
The first weeks were the sharpest. Brent crude passed US$100 a barrel on 8 March, its first time above that level in four years, and peaked near US$126. That was, by several measures, the largest disruption to world oil markets since the 1970s energy crisis. Gold spiked toward US$5,400 an ounce on the day of the strikes as investors moved into safe-haven assets.
Where prices sit now
The acute phase has passed, but the war has not, and prices have settled into a wider pattern shaped by more than one story at once.
Brent closed at US$90.87 a barrel on 17 August, up 2.7% that day, after Iran ruled out extending the truce, per CNBC. Gold has traded in roughly the US$4,300 to US$4,700 range through August. On 18 August specifically, gold fell even with a British military report of another vessel struck by an "unknown projectile" in the strait, because a bond-yield rise and a sell-off in AI-linked stocks outweighed the safe-haven pull that day, according to Kitco's market reporting. By 24 August, Kitco had gold near US$4,660, with US inflation data and the Fed's Jackson Hole symposium doing more to move the price that week than the war was.
That is worth sitting with. Gold is not a simple readout of this one conflict. Interest rate expectations, the dollar, and equity markets are all pulling on it too, and on any given day one of them can matter more than the war does. The honest version of this story is that Hormuz is one input among several, not the whole explanation for where gold trades.
Why a shipping lane moves a metal price at all
The mechanism is straightforward once it is stated directly. A fifth of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its LNG normally pass through the strait. A war that closes or threatens that lane raises energy costs, and higher energy costs feed into inflation expectations. Gold has no yield and no counterparty, which is part of why investors buy it when inflation risk rises alongside uncertainty they cannot easily price. That is the channel connecting a war fought a continent away to a number on a screen. It is not a reason to treat six months of casualties as background music for a market forecast.
A note on why this reads the way it does. An earlier draft of this piece described the war as tension that had "simmered" and "flared back into headlines this week," closed with a line about what it means for buyers, and moved straight into store hours and financing terms. That framing significantly understated what has actually happened: a head of state killed in a strike, nineteen mariners dead, a naval blockade still running six months on. We are not running that version. This page exists to state the facts of an ongoing war accurately, sourced to the reporting doing the actual work on the ground, without turning it into a sales hook. There is no call to action below, on purpose.
Sources: USNI News and the International Maritime Organization (casualty and attack data), Reuters (17 August posture shift), CNBC (17 August Brent close), Kitco News (18 and 24 August gold pricing and drivers), and Financial Magnates and contemporaneous wire reporting (late February/early March price peaks).