Vessels Stuck In Hormuz Further Strain on Shipping Industry Maritime Activity Reports, Inc. June 3, 2026 © Adobe Stock/Peter Hermes Furian Even if the U.S. and Iran agreed to halt the war and open the Strait of Hormuz, ships trapped in the Gulf will be unable to leave without safety assurances, the CEO of V.Group, a leading global ship manager, told Reuters. Renewed hostilities in the three-month-old conflict are testing a shaky ceasefire while hundreds of ships and about 20,000 seafarers remain stuck in the region with Hormuz largely closed. V.Group, which manages around 800 vessels, has 13 ships stuck in the Gulf, half of them tankers, said Rene Kofod-Olsen, group CEO with one of the world's top technical ship and crew management specialists. "You are in a situation where you supposedly have a ceasefire," he said during the Posidonia shipping week in Athens. "But you still have kinetic activity." Kofold-Olsen said, referring to drone or missile strikes. For traffic to return to pre-war levels, when on average 125 vessels passed via Hormuz daily, ship operators will need solid assurances of safe passage, in which the international community would need to be involved, he said. "I don't believe that global shipping by definition will go through in a material way the Strait of Hormuz before those things are actually guaranteed," Kofod-Olsen said. Shipping executives who gathered in Athens said that while crews in the Gulf were receiving supplies and it was possible to rotate teams inside the region, the strain from the conflict was deepening. "Ship owners are having to operate in irregular frameworks, which can be difficult or challenging for the industry, difficult and challenging for insurers as well," Alex Gregg-Smith, president for marine and offshore with top ship safety certifier Bureau Veritas, told Reuters. "It's putting pressure on the owners' operations." Dwain Hutchinson, managing director of the Bahamas  maritime  registry, told Reuters there wer