Pentagon says U.S. forces board sanctioned tanker Tifani in Indian Ocean

The Pentagon said U.S. forces boarded the M/T Tifani in the Indian Ocean as part of a widening maritime enforcement effort targeting ships linked to Iran, with the department describing the operation as conducted “without incident.” In a statement posted to social media, the Pentagon said the boarding involved what it called a “right-of-visit maritime interdiction.”

The Pentagon said the tanker was captured in the Bay of Bengal—between India and Southeast Asia—and was carrying Iranian oil, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing military operation. The official said the tanker was taken in a separate operation as the U.S. moves to track down vessels tied to Tehran and disrupt the networks it says provide material support to Iran.

The defense official said the military would decide over the next four days what to do with the vessel, including options such as towing it back to the United States or turning it over to another country. The boarding marked the second vessel linked to Iran that the U.S. military said it had interdicted, following an earlier Navy attack and seizure of an Iranian-flagged cargo ship on Sunday.

In its social media statement, the Pentagon described the Tifani as “stateless” despite it being a Botswana-flagged vessel. The department said U.S. forces would “pursue global maritime enforcement efforts to disrupt illicit networks and interdict sanctioned vessels providing material support to Iran — anywhere they operate,” adding that “International waters are not a refuge for sanctioned vessels.”

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that enforcement actions would extend beyond Iranian waters and beyond the area under U.S. Central Command. Speaking at the Pentagon to reporters, Caine said forces in other areas of responsibility would actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran, and he specifically pointed to operations in the Pacific.

The military has also laid out what it considers contraband, and said it will board, search and seize goods from merchant vessels “regardless of location.” A notice published Thursday said goods “destined for an enemy and that may be susceptible to use in armed conflict” are “subject to capture at any place beyond neutral territory.”

The latest interdiction comes as the U.S. and Iran navigate what legal experts described as an uneasy space for interpreting how the newly announced ceasefire applies to maritime action. Jason Chuah, a law professor at the City University of London and the Maritime Institute of Malaysia, said the situation is “an awkward space where the law doesn’t give you a clean yes-or-no answer” on whether the ceasefire was violated. Chuah said the U.S. appears to take the position that the conflict has not fully switched off—allowing the U.S. to keep enforcing a blockade and, in some cases, use limited force at sea.

Chuah said Iran is treating the ceasefire as a pause on all hostile acts. He said the dispute turns on whether the ceasefire suspended the right to use force, adding that if it did, firing on vessels or seizing them would be “very hard to square” with the United Nations Charter. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior defense adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said a ceasefire violation is “up for interpretation” because there were no defined terms, noting that the ceasefire was announced and agreed to but not formalized in a written document.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that the U.S. blockade was a breach of the ceasefire. In a letter, Iran’s U.N. Mission asked the U.N. Security Council and U.N. chief António Guterres to condemn the U.S. for seizing the Touska and its crew. Araghchi said “striking a commercial vessel and taking its crew hostage is an even greater violation,” according to the report.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the U.S. did not violate the ceasefire because it was limited to bombing Iran rather than the blockade. O’Hanlon said, in that view, the U.S. still had to enforce the blockade “if you’re going to make it mean anything.”