Trump tells Fox the US is taking the Strait of Hormuz and will charge a toll

At 12:28 UTC on 13 July 2026, Iran's Fars News Agency, a state-linked outlet that frequently carries Tehran's framing of regional flashpoints, posted video it described as President Donald Trump telling Fox News that the United States is "taking control of the Strait of Hormuz" and will charge a fee for any vessel transiting the waterway. Thirteen minutes later, Gaza English Updates carried a second excerpt, adding a pointed historical gloss: Trump told Fox that "we should have moved against them 47 years ago." Fars re-published the same set of claims at 13:03 UTC, bookending the morning with the same headline and the same footage.

Taken together, the three Telegram items amount to a single claim sourced to a single interview, restated by channels whose editorial alignment is either pro-Iran (Fars) or pan-Gaza (Gaza English Updates). No Western wire has, on the record captured in this thread, corroborated the specific "crossing fee" proposal, and the underlying Fox News segment is not yet linked in the material at hand. What is verifiable is that the statements are now in circulation in a form Tehran is actively amplifying, and that they describe a posture which, if operationalised, would be one of the most aggressive unilateral assertions of control over a global energy chokepoint in decades.

What Trump allegedly said

According to the Fars excerpts, Trump's central assertion is twofold. First, that the United States is "taking control of the Strait of Hormuz." Second, that the US will "charge a fee" for vessels to cross it. The framing is not conditional: it is presented as a fait accompli. Trump also told Fox, per the Gaza English Updates excerpt, that "Iran has nothing," and that the United States "should have moved against them 47 years ago."

The third element of the alleged interview is a narrative pivot to a prior agreement. Fars reports Trump claiming that "there was an agreement, but Iran violated it." The phrase is striking for what it does not specify: which agreement, signed when, by whom, and what counts as the alleged violation. The ceasefire framework that followed the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 is the most plausible referent, but the excerpts do not name it. Iran's official position is that no such violation occurred and that the United States is manufacturing a pretext.

Why the chokepoint matters

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow corridor between Iran and Oman through which a significant share of seaborne crude oil and liquefied natural gas transits each day. Control of the strait is, in practice, shared among the littoral states (Iran, Oman, the UAE in the southern approach) and the US Fifth Fleet, which operates out of Bahrain. A unilateral US "crossing fee" would, on its face, be a unilateral toll on global trade imposed by a non-littoral power on a waterway that international law treats as a strait used for international navigation.

That legal status is not a technicality. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea guarantees transit passage through such straits, and any levy on passage would be contestable in fora where the United States, having never ratified UNCLOS, would also be open to claims of acting outside the legal architecture it helped draft. The strategic symbolism of such a move would be considerable: the last major power to attempt anything like a transit toll in a critical waterway was the Soviet Union, in 1986, when it tried to assert a set of rules for navigation in the Black Sea; that move was widely treated as outside international law.

The Iranian counter-frame

Fars is not a neutral broadcaster. It is an outlet of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's media ecosystem, and its purpose in posting the excerpts is to feed a domestic and regional audience a particular story: that the United States is the destabilising actor, that any "agreement" is a fiction the US invents when convenient, and that Iran's position is reactive rather than aggressive. Read through that lens, the Fars framing is doing two things at once. It surfaces Trump's words to an Iranian and Russian-allied audience that will interpret them as an admission of intent, and it inoculates Iranian decision-makers against any future claim that they violated a deal that, in Tehran's telling, did not exist in the form Washington now describes.

Gaza English Updates layers a second framing on top, recasting the comments as a confession of historical error: that the United States, by Trump's own account, should have acted decades ago and is now trying to make up for lost time. This is the pan-Arab reading, and it tends to read US posture in the Gulf as long-delayed but ultimately inevitable.

The Western wire coverage of the same day is not in this thread, which means the dominant counter-reading is not yet captured here. On the strength of what is available, the structural question is whether the alleged statements represent a negotiating posture, a domestic political play to a US audience already conditioned to expect maximalist rhetoric on Iran, or the early shape of an actual policy decision. The source material does not let this publication adjudicate that question.

What remains uncertain

Three things are not yet clear, and the available sources do not resolve them. First, the specific content of the alleged prior agreement, and whether Iran formally signed it. Second, whether the United States has the maritime capacity, the coalition support, and the legal cover to enforce a unilateral transit fee. Third, the response of the littoral states, particularly Oman and the UAE, whose territorial waters abut the strait. None of these is answerable from the items in this thread. Each is the kind of question that will be settled in the days ahead by either action at sea, a Treasury or State Department notice to mariners, or a more substantive readout from Fox News itself.

The reporting is also notable for what it does not contain. No Iranian official is quoted denying the statements, because Tehran's preferred response is amplification rather than denial. No US military commander is quoted, and no operational guidance to the Fifth Fleet has been cited. The story, at the moment, is a claim, not a capability, and the gap between the two is where the next 72 hours will be fought.

This publication treats the Trump statements as reported, not as confirmed policy, and treats the Iranian-state amplification of those statements as a framing choice rather than corroboration. The wire provenance is Iranian and pan-Gaza channels; the underlying Fox News segment is not yet linked in the source chain.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/farsna/
• https://t.me/gazaenglishupdates/
• https://t.me/farsna/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fifth_Fleet