Iran to meet Gulf states and Iraq in Oman on Monday over the Strait of Hormuz

The blockade has pushed costs up, with oil prices surpassing $100 a barrel earlier this week.

That figure is the reason this meeting is being watched well beyond the region. A waterway carrying a fifth of global oil cannot be closed without the price being set by the closure rather than by supply and demand.

Widening the table

Al Jazeera's Sinem Koseoglu, reporting from Tehran, said Iran is giving the talks a wider political spectrum by inviting other regional countries.

"For some time we heard Iranian officials say that the regional issues should be solved by the regional actors, especially when it came to Hormuz," she said.

"So we are hearing from the Foreign Ministry that foreign ministers from the GCC countries and Iraq will be attending this meeting on Monday," she said, "and the meeting will be held in Oman."

Oman borders the strait alongside Iran, and the two have been discussing its management directly for several weeks.

The second phase

Iran and Oman, both of which border the strait, have been discussing how to manage its future for several weeks. Last month the two agreed on a shipping route, mine clearing and short-term management of the waterway.

Koseoglu described Monday's meeting as the next stage. "Basically it looks like they came to the second phase," she said, because Iranian officials had said earlier in the week that "they agreed on the main script on the temporary shipping lane and this would be announced soon".

A temporary shipping lane and a mine-clearing arrangement are practical instruments rather than a settlement. They would allow traffic to move under agreed conditions without either side conceding the larger question of who controls passage.

Iran's framing of the pressure

Speaking ahead of the BRICS summit in India on Friday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian described the current period as one of unprecedented complexity.

"Iran has been subjected to heavy sanctions in recent years," he said. The pressure, he added, "has reached a critical and dangerous stage in recent months following the military aggression by the United States and Israel".

He argued that the effects do not stay within one country's borders. "When a country is subjected to political and military pressure on its trade, energy, infrastructure and financial system, the repercussions extend beyond its borders," Pezeshkian said.

That is Iran's characterisation of the conflict and its causes. The United States and Israel describe the campaign that began in February differently.

The economic picture

Since the war began in February and Tehran responded by choking off the strait, the global economy has struggled. The United States has continued a naval blockade of Iranian ports while the waterway remains closed.

The two measures work against each other in one respect and together in another: each restricts the other side's trade, and both raise the cost of moving energy out of the Gulf.

What Monday can and cannot settle

The meeting is described as a discussion among regional states, with the foreign ministers of the GCC countries and Iraq attending. It is not a negotiation involving the United States or Israel, and the underlying conflict is not on its agenda.

What it could produce is the announcement of the temporary shipping lane that Iranian officials have said is already agreed in outline. That would not reopen the strait, but it would give commercial traffic a defined route through it.