Overview
- Week 24 diversions fell to 2,721 shipments, the lowest weekly total in 14 weeks. The UAE remains the largest source of diverted traffic, but its share of total diversions has fallen from to 52.3% in week 24 as volumes across all origin countries decline.
- The busiest single lane in week 24 is Salalah, Oman to Navi Mumbai, India
- Port dwell times continue to increase at key ports, including import dwell reaching highs at Navi Mumbai’s (25.4 days), Mersin (32 days)
- Air cargo shows the same structural pattern: Middle East hubs’ share of first-transit air traffic has never recovered to its pre-conflict level (27.5% to 14.5%), and Istanbul has nearly tripled in volume to overtake Dubai as the leading alternative hub.
Diversion volume falls to a 14-week low
Total weekly diversions through the Strait of Hormuz corridor dropped to 2,721 shipments in week 24, the lowest level in fourteen weeks. The decline isn’t a one-week blip: volume has been sliding steadily since week 20, down 41% over that span.
Week 24 marks the fourth straight weekly decline and the low point of the current Active Conflict 2 phase, which began in early July.
The UAE still dominates diverted traffic, but its share is shrinking
The UAE has been the largest single origin country for diverted shipments every week since tracking began, though its week 24 volume is roughly a fifth of what it was in week 1. Its share of total weekly diversions has fallen from about 75% in week 1 to just over 50% in week 24. Saudi Arabia and Oman have each held a fairly steady second and third position across the last eight weeks, while Qatar’s volumes remain a small fraction of the other three by comparison.
Short-haul Gulf shuffles dominate this week’s diversion lanes
Rather than long-haul re-routing, most of week 24’s heaviest diversion activity is short-haul repositioning within and around the Gulf. The single busiest lane, Salalah (Oman) to Navi Mumbai (India), accounts for roughly 9% of the week’s diverted volume. Three of the next four busiest lanes are UAE-internal shuffles between Fujairah, Khawr Fakkan, and Khalifa, and a fourth links Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Port to Khawr Fakkan.
The Fujairah–Khawr Fakkan pairing appears in both directions among the top three lanes, together accounting for roughly 16% of week 24’s diverted volume, a sign that much of this week’s activity is intra-UAE repositioning rather than new international routing.
Port dwell trends are diverging sharply across the network
Four ports are driving this week’s dwell story, and three of them just set new highs.
Mersin, Turkey’s leading Mediterranean gateway for Middle East-bound trade, hit records on two fronts at once: import dwell climbed to 32.2 days and transshipment dwell reached 30.8 days, both the highest points since tracking began. Navi Mumbai’s import dwell also set a new high, climbing to 25.4 days. Singapore’s import dwell is sitting at its highest levels on record, at 10.8 days, essentially matching last week’s mark.
Abu Dhabi rounds out the list, and its story is the least surprising: export dwell there has been elevated for months, and this week it set a new record at 53.2 days, its worst point since tracking began.
Air cargo confirms the pattern: Middle East hubs have lost share and never fully recovered
The same shift shows up in air cargo. From January through mid-August, the share of air shipments routed through a Middle East airport as their first stop fell sharply once the conflict began, and it has never recovered to where it started, not even during the ceasefire. The pattern holds in every phase measured since: this looks like a structural change in Gulf air routing, not a temporary dip.
Dubai’s volume has grown since the ceasefire, up roughly 11% versus its pre-conflict baseline, but that increase lags well behind Istanbul and Frankfurt, both of which have grown faster and now handle more daily traffic than Dubai. Istanbul has gained in every single phase without interruption, while Frankfurt’s growth has come with rising dwell times, a sign of congestion rather than a clean absorption of displaced cargo.
Transit times tell a similar story: they’ve climbed well above the pre-conflict baseline in the current phase and haven’t returned to normal in any phase, including the ceasefire.
Kuwait is effectively offline as a transit hub: volume collapsed once the conflict began and remains near zero today, while dwell for the cargo that does arrive has nearly tripled versus its pre-conflict baseline.
The impact
Taken together, week 24’s sea and air data point to the same underlying story from two different angles: less traffic is routing through Gulf infrastructure overall, but that traffic hasn’t simply resumed its old patterns as tension has ebbed and flowed. On the water, the UAE’s dominant share of diverted volume is eroding and most of the heaviest current diversion lanes are short repositioning moves rather than new long-haul routings, while congestion is building sharply at specific ports: this week, Abu Dhabi, Navi Mumbai, Mersin, and Singapore all either set new highs or sat at their highest levels on record, even as it eases at others. In the air, Middle East hubs have permanently ceded share to Istanbul and Frankfurt even through the ceasefire window, and transit times have never returned to pre-conflict levels. For shippers and carriers, that combination argues for planning around specific hubs and lanes rather than the corridor as a whole: a falling headline diversion count does not mean falling risk everywhere, and both port dwell and hub routing patterns are now durably different from where they started.
