Salalah, the Iran-Gulf states summit on Hormuz is postponed with no new date

The ministerial meeting between Iran and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, convened by Oman in Salalah for Monday, September 14, did not take place: Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi announced its indefinite postponement in a message posted on X late in the evening of the 13th, without indicating a new date. The stated reason referred to the interest of consensus, with no further details. We wrote about the meeting — then still scheduled for Monday — on September 12.

The meeting was expected at the level of foreign ministers of the six Council countries plus Iran and would have been the first of its kind since the start of the war, on February 28, 2026. Two elements defined its scope: it would have taken place without the United States, and according to a source cited by CNN one of the objectives was to agree on maps of transit routes through the Strait. Not a political agreement, then, but the technical step on which any reopening plan depends: where ships pass and who recognizes them.

The two capitals involved do not tell the same story regarding the reasons for the postponement. Muscat sticks to the formula of consensus. An Iranian foreign ministry official, cited by the Fars news agency and picked up by Al Jazeera and Seoul Economic Daily, said the decision was made jointly by Tehran and Muscat at the request of some countries in the region, which were not named. The Iranian version currently remains an attribution: none of the Gulf capitals has confirmed it publicly.

One detail helps measure how fragile the convening was: Oman had not released a complete official list of invitees, and Bahrain had already announced that it would not participate absent a resumption of relations with Iran. The declared absence of one of the six Council members thus preceded the postponement, and the composition of the table itself had never been made public in full.

On the markets side, oil prices rose when trading resumed on Monday the 14th. The postponement is not the only factor: Saudi Arabia kept the East-West pipeline closed all weekend, the 1,200-kilometer conduit damaged on Friday by drone attacks. It is the infrastructure that allows crude to bypass the Strait by moving toward the Red Sea; with that shut down and the Salalah table postponed, the two alternative routes to shipping through Hormuz are both unavailable on the same day.

The Reuters dispatch carried by Internazionale and the Financial Times account reported by Oman Observer agree on the essential point and its limit: the meeting is postponed, not cancelled, and neither party has announced a replacement date or an alternative format of contact.

Sources: CNN; Al Jazeera; Reuters via Internazionale; Seoul Economic Daily; Oman Observer. Fars (Iranian news agency) is cited as an attribution via third-party sources.