BANDAR ABBAS, Iran — Mohammad-Amin, 47, has spent his adult life fishing the Strait of Hormuz. For more than three months this year, he could not. The fighting between Iran and the United States that swept through the waterway forced him to stop going out altogether, draining the modest savings he had set aside for exactly such disruptions.
He resumed about 20 days ago, he said, driven not by confidence that the danger had passed but by the arithmetic of survival. "If we don't go, we will die of hunger and I have three children," Mohammad-Amin said as he worked nylon twine through a damaged net on the Bandar Abbas waterfront.
The ceasefire that halted the main phase of fighting was sealed April 8, ending nearly 40 days of intense combat. Sporadic clashes continued after that date, unsettling the waterfront long after the formal agreement. The Bandar Abbas seafront—lined with small cafes where residents shelter from the summer heat—absorbed repeated strikes during the fighting. "They used to strike this place every day; it had become normal," said Hossein, 53, one of the fishermen who went back to sea as soon as the clashes eased, even as many of his neighbors stayed ashore.
The human cost among the fishing community was concentrated and severe. Close to a dozen fishermen died in waters off Bandar Abbas and the nearby southern islands. Seventeen others from Sistan-Baluchistan province, south of the strait, went missing during the fighting, according to Iranian media reports. For families whose income depends entirely on daily catches, those losses removed breadwinners with no replacement income in sight.
The material damage extended far beyond the dead and missing. More than 2,000 fishermen from Hormozgan province—the coastal region that includes Bandar Abbas—lost fishing equipment during the conflict, the Iran Daily reported in late July. Hundreds of fishing and trading vessels were damaged, according to the Iranian Students News Agency.
For Bagher Abbaszadeh, 39, the boat is not simply his livelihood—it supports five families, including his own. "If they had hit the boat, that would have been it for us," he said, threading a torn net through his hands on the same waterfront. The boat was spared. The nets were not.
Net damage has taken on a new character since the fighting. Before the war, nets snagged on reefs, anchors and the routine debris of a busy shipping lane. Now they catch on the submerged wreckage of vessels hit during the conflict. Mohammad-Amin said his crew has replaced four nets since resuming work roughly three weeks ago—a pace of equipment loss he cannot sustain on a fisherman's income. "The sea was dirty before and now it has become even worse with the wreckage of these ships," he said.
Hossein, who declined to give his full name, said he cannot always identify what is destroying his gear. "Several ships were hit," he said, leaving the count open—the underwater hazard map of the strait is still being formed by the men whose nets trace it.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world's traded oil through a navigable channel that narrows to about 33 kilometers at its tightest point. The fighting disrupted commercial shipping alongside the fishing economy. Seventeen seafarers died since hostilities began, the majority in Iranian strikes, with additional crews stranded aboard vessels unable to leave the strait as negotiations dragged on.
Fishermen returning now do so without certainty the ceasefire will hold. The waterfront in Bandar Abbas still bears the physical marks of the strikes. Boats that survived sit alongside gaps where others were destroyed. The infrastructure for offloading and selling the daily catch—the small markets and quays that make a working port—took damage that has only partly been repaired.
Mohammad-Amin is back at sea anyway. The calculus is unchanged from the one that sent generations of Hormozgan fishermen out before dawn: the water, however dangerous, offers something the shore does not. "We could wait no longer," he said.
