Pakistan’s largest port, Karachi, might as well be a warehouse as a place of action, with some 3,000 containers waiting. They await someone to go pick them up. They were meant for Iran. The vessels that should have arrived to take them across the Arabian Sea were halted when, in late February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most important shipping lanes — was turned into a war zone.
But after two months of ship strangling, Iran is for once having to plead with its neighbour Pakistan to transport goods by road. Al Jazeera has seen internal documents showing Iran’s officials negotiating with their Pakistani counterparts and shipping industry leaders over transporting the stranded cargo across the border in Balochistan. It would be slower. It would cost more. But it may be their only option.
How the Strait Became a Weapon
On February 28, Israel and the United States started airstrikes on Iran, which began their conflict with Iran. Iran has started to block the Strait of Hormuz which currently handles 20 percent of global oil trade. The strait experiences daily traffic from 140 ships who use it as their passageway. The temperature during late April reached only single digits. Since the tenuous ceasefire on April 8, just 45 vessels have been able to pass, Kpler, which tracks the shipping industry, has reported.
The blockade is not a blockade. It is not just impounding the sea. It is imposing tariffs, limiting which vessels can enter, and using the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — which itself has been sanctioned by the United States — to charge more than US$1m per vessel, often in yuan or even cryptocurrency. Western companies are prevented from paying a sanctioned entity, and they are not going. Asian ships from India, China, and Iraq are not as legally constrained, but Iranian gunboats have shot at India’s ships in the past; most recently on April 18, when it rejected two tankers after, allegedly, granting them permission initially to transit. On April 22, the Greek freight ship Epaminondas was fired on and received rocket-propelled grenades off the coast of Oman, despite earlier being given approval to pass. The rules, apparently, are shifting, the threat is not.
And since April 13, the Trump administration has overlaid an American naval blockade on top of that by Iran. This is now described as a “dual blockade”: Iran can decide who enters the Gulf, and the U.S. can decide who leaves Iran. According to U.S. Central Command, 14 ships have been turned back in the first 72 hours. Meanwhile, noting on Truth Social, President Trump boiled it down to one line: “Iran is collapsing financially. They want the Strait of Hormuz open NOW – they need money!”
The Price of Moving Anything
The accounting of commercial shipping has gone out the window. Chairman of the Pakistan Ship’s Agents Association, Mohammed Rajpar, stated that prior to the war, the cost of insuring a vessel against war-risk for a trip through this water was approximately 0.12% of its value. This has increased to 5%. On a very large crude carrier or VLCC of $100 million value, that translates into a one-way premium of $5 million (if one can get it). Oil tankers can afford it because the spreads on crude oil cargoes are so big. Container ships moving cargo cannot afford to. That’s why 3,000 containers are stuck in Karachi, while — albeit limited — oil shipments still flow.
The reason, said Andrew Jamieson, the co-head of shipping at commodity trader Gunvor, is very basic: crew. “If you don’t have the crew, you don’t have to go if you think it’s dangerous,” he told an industry meeting in Lausanne. It isn’t legal or financial. It is human safety. And it is not one that can be fixed by policy.
Pakistan’s New Road
Even before the Hormuz crisis, Pakistan and Iran were working towards the future. The Pakistan-Iran transit corridor became part of the multinational TRI (Transports Internationaux Routiers) system a day before the U.S. embargo on April 12. The first cargo, which was of frozen meat in cold storage trucks, was dispatched from Karachi, through Gwadar, and Iran on to Central Asia and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Officials have opened all of Pakistan’s major border points at Taftan, Rimdan, Sost and Gwadar to transit traffic, Sanaullah Abro, the Director of Transit Trade Customs, told The Express Tribune.
The corridor served as a method to discover different routes. The Pakistani government closed the Torkham and Chaman border points in October 2025 because of rising Taliban terrorist activities in Afghanistan. Pakistan needed to establish trade connections with Iran because its regular Central Asian trading routes had become inaccessible.
Pakistan must deliver all its containerized shipments to Iran but requires new routes which it has promised to use for frozen meat delivery to Uzbekistan. Pakistani sources who spoke with Al Jazeera about the negotiations matter must maintain their anonymous status because of ongoing discussions. The daily entry limit for trucks to Pakistan stands at 200. The ministers from both countries negotiated in Istanbul during February where they decided between 800 to 1,000 trailers could be permitted. The process of clearing 3,000 containers would still require several weeks to complete.
The decision to open six land routes shows how quickly trade patterns are shifting under pressure. With more than 3,000 containers stuck at Karachi and Iranian ports constrained by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, overland transport through Pakistan is no longer optional, it is becoming essential. This shift creates an uneasy balance. Iran now relies on Pakistani routes to keep goods moving, while Pakistan depends on Iran’s territory to reach Central Asia. The dependency runs both ways, but not on equal terms.
The Bigger Picture: Routes Redrawn
The Hormuz crisis has led the whole region to think geographically. The Danish shipping giant Maersk launched a “land bridge” connecting Jeddah, Salalah, Sohar and Khor Fakkan in early March. Jeddah saw a 40% increase in cargo in weeks. On 27 March, Saudi Arabia Railways opened an international logistics route, linking the ports of Dammam, Yanbu and Jubail with the Jordanian border.
South Korea, which imports some 70% of its crude from the Middle East and trucked almost all of it through the strait, rushed to buy 273 million barrels from other sources — enough for three months. Its producer prices jumped 4.1% from a year ago in March. Japan warned of an electricity shortage in the summer if the Middle East LNG disruption continues. One billion barrels of crude oil and oil products had been removed from the world market since the crisis began, said Vitol CEO Russell Hardy at the Lausanne meeting.
If the sea blockade continues, it will hurt the Iranian economy, said Jamil Ahmed Khan, former Pakistani ambassador to Bahrain. “[The] Dot economy is largely oil dependent,” he said. “These limitations impact its foreign exchange and economic stability.” Still Javed Hassan, analyst for the CRSS warned Iran’s decision-making was not to be viewed from the perspective of peacetime. “When a leadership believes they are under attack, they tend to place less emphasis on economic rationality as from a peacetime perspective,” he said. “It is possible they could continue keeping the strait clogged for longer than anticipated.”
Pakistan’s Careful Balance
In all this, for Pakistan, the politics are sensitive. Islamabad has been a peacemaker between the U.S. and Iran, hosting negotiations that broke down on April 12. It permits some Iranian (or pro-Iranian) ships to pass through its waters and ports. It has now opened a land route with Iran. But its section of the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, which was launched in 2013 by former Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has yet to be constructed. Iran has finished its section. Pakistan is yet to lay a pipe, hampered by U.S. sanctions and domestic gas shortfall.
The same U.S. sanctions that hold back the pipeline turn every new commercial deal with Iran into a legal conundrum. Neither will Pakistani officials sign on to any talks about trucking goods to Iran — not yet. It is also legal. Firms participating in embargoed commerce can also be penalised by the US, no matter where they operate.
A Road Built by Necessity
What Hormuz has done is hasten decisions that geography always dictated but politics always held at bay. Pakistan is located between Iran and Central Asia. Gwadar, constructed by Chinese investors as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), was always going to be bigger than Pakistan alone. It was to be a gateway beyond Pakistan. The crisis is converting that vision into reality — not elegantly, not by design but because the sea is too risky, too costly an option.
The boxes in Karachi aren’t only a transport issue. They are a gauge of the progress of the Hormuz crisis. The Persian Gulf as a battlefield, between the United States and Iran, has filled a port in Pakistan with unmoved cargo, and prompted the best possible alternative for two of Pakistan’s neighbours: a road through Balochistan.
That road exists. It is narrow, slow and highly sensitive. But in a crisis a slow road is better than no road.