Day 130 of the Hormuz crisis produced the first confirmed strike on an LNG carrier since the war began. Iran's IRGC Navy hit two commercial vessels overnight in the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz, among them the Qatari LNG carrier Al Rekayyat, a Nakilat Q-Flex, ~8 nautical miles east of Limah, Oman, on the southern corridor. The vessel took a port-side hit and an engine-room fire; the crew is safe, no one was hurt, and no pollution has been reported. UKMTO confirmed the incident directly. Incident detail is in today's alert and morning brief; this piece is about what the strike changes, not what happened.

LNG tonnage had been the one asset class the war spared. Crude carriers absorbed four months of drone strikes, mine risk, and premium spirals; LNG carriers did not take a hit in 129 days of the same campaign. That gap was never an accident, and closing it reshapes the calculus for four separate audiences at once: shipowners pricing the next fixture, underwriters about to redraw a listing, NATO ministers deciding in Ankara whether to send minesweepers into the same stretch of water, and traders who moved European gas six times harder than they moved Brent on the same overnight news.

Four questions decide what Day 130 means for the rest of the crisis. Why did LNG go unhit for so long, and why did that end now? What does the strike do to a NATO deliberation that was already fragile before it landed? What does it do to the insurance math already reshaping Hormuz transit? And which of several paths does the next ten days actually follow, given that today's price move only accounts for one of them?