Ocean Oct 14, 2026 · 8 min read

A container ship sinks at Hormuz

A container ship sinks at Hormuz, and the bypass ports are now in range. The 2,824 TEU feeder GFS Pride was hit by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz on 13 October and sank. All 21 crew got off. Sister ship GFS Giselle (4,350 TEU) was hit next day and reached anchorage under its own power. Our view: the Gulf of Oman ports shippers use to avoid the strait are no longer safe ground. Both ships ran loops out of Khor Fakkan and Fujairah. UKMTO logged 15 attacks between 6 and 14 October, Al Jazeera reports. We expect higher surcharges on UAE east-coast and Omani routings within four weeks.

Hormuz has sunk a container ship. The ports outside the strait are no longer a safe bet.
A container ship has gone down at Hormuz. On 13 October the Singapore-flagged feeder GFS Pride, a 2,824 TEU ship built in 2008, was hit by a projectile while in the Strait of Hormuz. (A TEU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is the standard measure of box capacity. A feeder is a small ship that moves containers between big hub ports and smaller ones.) The ship caught fire and sank. All 21 crew were evacuated with no injuries.
A day later, on 14 October, its sister ship GFS Giselle (4,350 TEU, built 2015) was hit too. It took hull damage but reached a safe anchorage under its own power. All 22 crew are safe.
Our view is simple. Since late February, the Gulf container trade has survived by routing around the strait through ports on its outer side, such as Khor Fakkan, Fujairah and Sohar. This week showed that the ships serving those ports are now inside the danger zone. Forwarders should stop treating the Gulf of Oman side as the safe workaround and start pricing it as part of the war.

What happened on 13 and 14 October

The Loadstar reported on 14 October that missiles struck the two Global Feeder Shipping (GFS) ships within 24 hours. AIS data, the ship-tracking signal vessels broadcast, places GFS Pride about one nautical mile east of Ras Makhbuq, Oman, when it was hit. Both ships fly the Singapore flag, and neither had Singaporean crew.
According to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), as cited by both The Loadstar and Container News, GFS Pride is the second vessel lost since the US-Israel-Iran war began on 28 February. The first was the bulk carrier Cape Dao, which The Loadstar says was hit by two torpedoes on 23 September and sank in the Gulf of Oman on 13 October. One Indian seafarer died. That makes Pride the first container ship lost in this war.
The accounts of the cause don’t agree. Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) called it an attack. “MPA is deeply concerned about the continued attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz,” it said, as quoted by Container News. “Such attacks are unprovoked, unjustifiable and a breach of international law.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGC Navy) told a different story. It said an unnamed container ship carrying more than 2,500 containers hit a mine while using an “unauthorised and dangerous” route, The Loadstar reported. The IRGC did not name the ship.
GFS Pride was not the only box ship hit. UKMTO (United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, the Royal Navy centre that logs incidents at sea) issued Warning 172/26, verified at 16:40 UTC on 13 October. It describes a 50,000-tonne container ship “struck by an unknown projectile” during an inbound transit of the strait. The report reached UKMTO late. Damage was minor, no one was hurt, and the ship carried on. UKMTO did not name it.

The bypass is now the target

The routes matter more than the ships. The Loadstar says GFS Pride ran a Khor Fakkan–Fujairah–Karachi service. GFS Giselle ran Fujairah–Khor Fakkan–Nhava Sheva. Khor Fakkan and Fujairah sit on the UAE’s Gulf of Oman coast. Karachi and Nhava Sheva are in Pakistan and India. These are the loops that carry cargo for Gulf importers and exporters who can no longer count on a direct call inside the strait.
Carriers have spent months building that workaround. In a September operational update, summarised by Tradlinx, Maersk said selected Khor Fakkan cargo would be discharged at Fujairah and trucked under bond to Jebel Ali. It said cargo for Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE would be transshipped via Salalah and Khor Fakkan, then landbridged to Sharjah and feedered on. The whole plan rests on the outer ports staying open and the ships serving them staying afloat.
That assumption was already under strain. Iran International reported that the tanker Petro Dolphin was hit by a drone at Sohar anchorage off Oman, with two of its 11 crew missing. Now a feeder on a Khor Fakkan loop has been sunk. We read this as the risk zone spreading out from the strait to the ports that were meant to replace it.

A war that has moved closer to boxes

The attacks are getting more frequent. Al Jazeera reports that energy analytics firm Kpler counted 10 tankers struck between 28 September and 4 October, and another on 5 October. UKMTO then recorded 15 more attacks between 6 and 14 October, 11 of them in the last four days. The US-led Joint Maritime Information Center rates the threat to shipping “severe”, its second-highest level.
Iran says its navy has set up new units east of the strait, across the Sea of Oman and the Arabian Sea, with real-time surveillance. That is exactly where the bypass ports are. An Iranian official told Reuters, as reported by Al Jazeera, that Tehran changed tactics about 10 days ago, partly to influence the US midterm elections in November.
Both sides claim control of the water. “You are smuggling, but the strait is under Iran’s control, and we manage it,” Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei said, according to Al Jazeera. US Central Command answered: “IRGC’s navy commander has no navy. American forces and regional partners clearly control the Strait of Hormuz.” Chris Featherstone, a political scientist at the University of York, told Al Jazeera: “For Iran, they may be seeing this as a point to increase pressure on the Trump administration.”
The talks to reopen the strait have stalled. Iran put forward a seven-point proposal at the UN General Assembly. Qatari intermediaries relayed a US reply, SAFETY4SEA reported on 12 October. Rezaei’s verdict, as quoted by Iran International: “The US has agreed to some of Iran’s seven conditions, but we consider its response INADEQUATE”.
The numbers show the result. Kpler data cited by Al Jazeera put oil through the strait at about 2.9m barrels on 11 October, down from nearly 20.8m on 8 October, against a pre-war daily average of 17.1m. Iran International put overall Hormuz traffic about 75% below pre-conflict levels. Brent crude stood at $106.58 a barrel at 00:30 GMT on 14 October, per Al Jazeera. That keeps bunker (ship fuel) surcharges high on every lane, not just the Gulf.

GFS was the feeder that stayed

The ships’ owner makes this worse for Gulf supply chains. GFS is 81% owned by Abu Dhabi’s AD Ports. On the same day as the sinking, The Loadstar published Alphaliner data on the three biggest feeder operators.
X-Press Feeders is still the largest, at 182,776 TEU worldwide. But its fleet shrank 7.1% year on year, and its Middle East capacity fell 34.2%, about 38,000 TEU. “Fallout from the Middle East conflict forced X-Press to make service cuts across the region,” Alphaliner said. DP World, mostly through its Unifeeder fleet, cut global capacity 2.5%, including 7,500 TEU in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent.
GFS went the other way. Its capacity rose 31%. Its Middle East and Indian subcontinent capacity grew 26.9% and now makes up about 70% of its fleet. It replaced Gulf calls with Red Sea ports and kept its network largely intact while rivals pulled back. It is now the largest of the three in that region, ahead of X-Press (about 73,500 TEU there) and DP World (about 70,500 TEU).
So the operator that stayed is the one that just lost a ship. We think that is the real story for forwarders. If GFS now trims its exposure, there is no obvious feeder ready to take the slack.

Insurance, surcharges and the cost of a box

War-risk insurance is the extra cover shipowners buy to sail into conflict zones. It is priced as a share of the ship’s value per voyage. Insurance Business reported in September that Hormuz hull war-risk premiums were about 0.15% to 0.25% before the war. After the first US and Israeli strikes, Marcus Baker, global head of marine at broker Marsh, put them at 3% to 10%. Most of that pricing has been driven by tankers. A sunk container ship gives underwriters a reason to price feeders the same way.
Shippers already pay for the workaround. Container News reported in July that Maersk’s emergency contingency surcharge on cargo out of Salalah, Sohar, Fujairah and Khor Fakkan ranged from $2,800 per 20-foot dry box to $7,700 per 20-foot reefer, depending on destination and equipment. Maersk’s September update, per Tradlinx, listed emergency freight of $1,800 per 20-foot and $3,000 per 40-foot dry box, plus $1,000 more if a ship transits the strait. Those prices were set before a feeder on a bypass loop was sunk.
For cargo on the two GFS ships, the questions are practical. Boxes on Pride are lost. Cargo owners will need to file with their cargo insurers. Giselle’s cargo faces delay while the ship is inspected and repaired. If the owner declares general average, the old maritime rule under which all cargo owners share the cost of saving a voyage, shippers may have to post security before their boxes are released. That has not been announced. But forwarders with cargo on Giselle should check their clients’ cover now.

What we expect next

Here is what we think forwarders should plan for. First, expect longer and less reliable transit times on any routing via Khor Fakkan, Fujairah or Sohar, as feeder operators weigh crew safety and insurance cost. Second, check whether clients’ cargo policies include war risk. Many basic policies exclude it. Third, quote Gulf moves with surcharge clauses that let you pass on new carrier charges at short notice.
Our prediction: by mid-November, at least one major carrier will raise its emergency surcharge on cargo routed through Khor Fakkan, Fujairah or Sohar. Within the same window, GFS will suspend, merge or reroute at least one of the two loops that lost ships. If the attack rate of the past week holds, we also expect the first public increase in war-risk quotes for container ships calling UAE east-coast ports before the end of October.

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