Less than three years after India, the United States, and seven partners agreed at the G20 in New Delhi to build the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, the project’s official endpoint remains an Israeli port on the Mediterranean. The February 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed how thin the redundancy across the region’s three maritime chokepoints really was.
A 2026 Atlantic Council follow-up reframes IMEC from a single line into a network of corridors, threading Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria into redundant Mediterranean exit points. The math, anchored by infrastructure that has either just opened or is mid-build, works out to roughly twenty million TEUs of annual Mediterranean exit capacity, equivalent to about sixty percent of the containers that normally transit the Strait of Hormuz.
The Corridor the G20 Signed in 2023
The IMEC was announced on September 9, 2023, on the margins of the G20 summit in New Delhi, with India, the United States, the European Union, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France, Germany, and Italy signing the memorandum of understanding. The plan combined maritime shipping, rail, road, fiber-optic cables, and energy pipelines into a single spine linking India’s western ports to Europe through the Gulf and the Levant. Its eastern leg carries cargo by sea from India to Gulf ports; its northern leg was to take freight overland through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Israel’s Haifa Port, then by short-sea shipping to terminals in Greece, Italy, and France.
Within weeks, the project stalled. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza halted the Saudi-Israeli normalization talks that had been a precondition for the overland segment through Israel. A 2025 sizing of the project found that roughly forty-six trains a day, carrying 1.5 million TEUs annually on single-stack cargo rail, could become operational, but the analysis also identified a financing gap close to $5 billion before the corridor could be minimally operational. The same report projected that transshipment via IMEC could compress travel time by 40 percent, to about twelve days, generating about $5.4 billion in annual savings on Asia-Europe trade. That gave the corridor a logistics rationale, but the political conditions for moving freight through Israel never returned.
Why a Single Line Stops Working Now
Attacks by Yemen’s Houthi forces on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023 and quickly reshaped the Asia-Europe map. By early 2024, traffic through the Suez Canal had dropped 50 percent year-over-year, while the volume transiting around the Cape of Good Hope surged about 74 percent above the prior year’s level, a 2024 Red Sea shipping-disruption analysis showed. Carriers were already rerouting around Africa before the next disruption hit.
The pivot from a single line to a network follows from a few numbers. The Strait of Hormuz carried about 20 million barrels of oil per day in 2024, roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption and a quarter of seaborne oil trade, with the chokepoint’s oil-flow tracking data showing volumes largely flat in the first quarter of 2025. Persian Gulf ports together handled about 33 million TEUs a year, with Jebel Ali alone at 15.5 million TEUs and Khalifa Port adding 6.6 million TEUs in 2025, and both sat entirely behind the Hormuz chokepoint. About two-thirds of Jebel Ali’s volume and 65 percent of Khalifa Port’s volume was transshipment, not local cargo, so a closure of the strait would ripple well past the Gulf itself. The redundancy below the waterline was already thin; overland alternatives in the region had not been built.
- 20 million barrels per day of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024 (US Energy Information Administration, June 2025)
- ~33 million TEUs annually across Persian Gulf ports (Drewry research, March 2026)
- ~50% year-over-year drop in Suez Canal traffic in early 2024 (IMF PortWatch, March 2024)
- ~74% rise in Cape of Good Hope transit over the same period (IMF)
On February 28, 2026, US and Israeli strikes on Iran triggered a parallel shutdown of both the Strait of Hormuz and parts of the Red Sea, Container Management reported, with Iran’s IRGC broadcasting VHF warnings that the waterway was closed to all shipping. Carriers had no working maritime workaround, and overland alternatives in the region had not been wired together. The case for a multi-node IMEC stopped being aspiration and became arithmetic.
A Network of Four Nodes
The 2025 Atlantic Council report sized the corridor as a single line; the 2026 follow-up sizes it as a web. The body behind IMEC now comprises four operational nodes and the missing rail links between them, with a corridor that survives one disruption able to absorb several at once. The reframing moves IMEC away from a Saudi-Israeli political precondition toward an architecture defined by ports and railways that exist or are mid-build.
Each node adds a specific kind of redundancy. Oman’s three deepwater ports sit outside Hormuz entirely, on the Arabian Sea, funneling traffic overland into the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals at Jeddah Islamic Port and Neom’s Oxagon add western exits that bypass the Gulf altogether. Egypt’s Mediterranean cluster at East Port Said, Alexandria, Damietta, and the canal-zone terminals adds a high-capacity east-of-Suez gateway. Syria’s reopened Mediterranean ports at Tartus and Latakia, under DP World and CMA CGM concession, add a second Eastern Mediterranean exit beyond Israel. The four together form a system, not a string.
The math behind the network lines up roughly as follows. The four-node Mediterranean exit cluster could deliver more than twenty million TEUs of annual capacity, equivalent to about sixty percent of the container traffic that would normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and the same network could carry more than seventy percent of an estimated $135 billion in India-EU trade.
Four corridor nodes at a glance
| Node | Anchor port | Annual container capacity | Rail status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oman | Sohar, Salalah, Duqm | 2.43 million TEUs in H1 2025 (combined Sohar-Salalah-Duqm); 3 million TEUs of latent capacity at Salalah alone | Hafeet Rail at roughly 40 percent completion; Sohar to Abu Dhabi freight train will carry 15,000 tons or 276 TEU per trip |
| Saudi Arabia | Jeddah Islamic Port; Neom (Oxagon) | 8 million+ TEUs at Jeddah; 2026 launch target at Neom | SAR North-South Railway operational to Al-Haditha; Landbridge aimed at 2034 |
| Egypt | Suez Canal Container Terminal (East Port Said), Alexandria, Damietta | 7 million TEUs at SCCT after November 2025 expansion; roughly 10 million TEUs of additional capacity expected within three to five years | $4.5 billion Siemens-led electrified high-speed rail, 660 km, freight trial operations began November 2025 |
| Syria | Latakia, Tartus | Latakia capacity to grow from 250,000 to 625,000 TEUs by end of 2026; about 95 percent of Syrian containerized trade already moves through Latakia | Latakia-Aleppo and Tartus-Damascus freight lines operational; Damascus-Amman passenger service targeted by end of 2026, freight in three to five years |
The numbers do not solve the politics. Saudi-Israeli normalization remains the missing key to the original northern IMEC route through Haifa Port, and Saudi Arabia has conditioned any normalization on a credible pathway to a Palestinian state. Egypt is politically stable, but its customs regime fragments across the country’s multiple ports, slowing throughput. Jordan lacks the freight rail network needed to take SAR train traffic onto its own soil. Syria is the highest-risk node: the political transition that brought DP World and CMA CGM back has only just completed, and the rail link across the border at Jaber-Nasib still depends on a March 2026 trilateral truck-transit agreement that has yet to be stress-tested at scale. The network of corridors only matters once these constraints are wired through.
Oman Stays Outside the Chokepoints
Oman’s geography is the network’s cleanest asset. The country borders the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen at the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, with a coastline that spans both the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. None of its major ports sit behind the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab al-Mandab, and cargo from any of them can reach the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or the open Arabian Sea within hours by road. As container traffic has rotated away from the Strait of Hormuz, that geography has begun to translate directly into throughput. Oman’s three flagship ports at Sohar in the north, Salalah in the south, and Duqm in the centre handled 2,427,195 TEUs in the first half of 2025, an 11.7 percent jump on the same period of 2024, per the Omani Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. Salalah alone carries about 3 million TEUs of latent capacity, with one constraint that recurs across the network: a single freight railway does not yet connect it to Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
The 238 km Hafeet Rail line being built between Sohar and the UAE’s Etihad Rail network will eventually close that gap, with freight trains designed to run at up to 120 km/h carrying up to 15,000 tons or 276 TEU per trip. Construction is about 40 percent complete, and Sohar-to-Abu Dhabi freight transit is being targeted at about one hundred minutes once open. Until Hafeet Rail is operational, Oman’s gateway role depends on road.
A Sohar-to-Dubai run via the Al Wajajah-Hatta border covers about 230 km, and a green corridor for overland container shipments between Dubai and Omani ports was declared on 12 March 2026. The 1,700 km of open desert road between Salalah and Dubai is a marginal route, with trucked 40-foot containers from Salalah running between $3,000 and $5,000 against $200 to $400 for drayage from Jebel Ali, but the network’s redundancy does not need Salalah to absorb every rerouted box, only to be live when nothing else is.
Saudi Arabia Stretches Across the Network
Saudi Arabia is the corridor’s structural backbone: every other node passes through its geography. Freight from the UAE enters at Al Ghuwaifat-Al Silah on the E11 highway, with secondary flows from Oman crossing at Al Batha-Wajajah, and from those crossings the road network runs 1,300 km north to the Jordanian border at Al-Haditha, the same crossing the SAR North-South Railway now reaches from the eastern side of the country.
SAR launched the Al-Haditha-bound rail service in March 2026, after Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz halted marine traffic at King Abdulaziz Port, King Fahd Industrial Port, and Jubail Commercial Port. The 1,700 km service runs from Abdulaziz Port in Dammam via the freight line to Riyadh and onward via Al Zabirah junction to Al-Haditha, with each train carrying 400 TEUs in both directions and a transit time across Saudi Arabia of about half that of road. The service runs on track that existed before the crisis: SAR’s North-South Railway has been operating its commercial freight services since 2011, and SAR’s domestic freight traffic predates the closure by years. From Al-Haditha onward, freight still moves by truck into Jordan, because Saudi Arabia has no freight rail connection across its neighbour.
Egypt Builds the Mediterranean Exit
Egypt sits at the junction of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, with its Sinai-adjacent entry on the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba giving it two Red Sea gateways. The principal Red Sea gateway at Ain Sokhna, located 43 km south of Suez City and operated by DP World, took the bulk of inbound Saudi cargo during the February 2026 closure, and the Suez Canal Container Terminal (SCCT) at East Port Said absorbed it on the Mediterranean side.
The Suez Canal Container Terminal celebrated a $500 million expansion in November 2025, adding 955 metres of quay and 510,000 square metres of yard space, supported by 12 quay cranes and 30 electric RTGs. The work raised SCCT’s installed capacity by 2.2 million TEUs to a total of 7 million TEUs, and the November 2025 terminal expansion put East Port Said and SCCT third globally and first in the Middle East and North Africa on the Container Port Performance Index for 2024, jointly published by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence. The terminal is now one of eight in APM Terminals’ East-West backbone network, designed for transshipment between A.P. Moller-Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd services. Egypt’s high-speed rail will eventually handle a parallel mode of freight movement across the same geography, with trial freight operations beginning in November 2025 on an electrified line expected to lift Egypt’s rail freight share by 15 percent once fully operational.
We are proud to support the Egyptian government’s ambition to transform its transport sector by building its first high-speed electrical rail network.
Roland Busch, President and Chief Executive Officer of Siemens AG, said in the September 2021 Egypt high-speed rail contract announcement. The Siemens-led system is the first fully electric mainline rail network in Egypt and connects both sea and dry ports to inland logistics hubs. Across the wider Mediterranean port complex, ongoing expansions will add roughly ten million TEUs of annual capacity inside three to five years, including new terminals at Alexandria, Damietta, and Abu Qir.
Syria Reopens
Syria sits at the geographic hinge between the Arabian Peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean, and its M5 highway spine, running from the Jordanian border through Damascus and Homs to the coast, offers a direct overland route connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean ports of Tartus and Latakia. For nearly a decade, that route was severed by conflict, sanctions, and the collapse of the Syrian state; the political transition of 2024 and 2025 reopened it.
DP World signed a 30-year concession with Syria’s General Authority for Land and Sea Ports on 13 July 2025 to develop and operate the Port of Tartus, with the agreement structured as a build-operate-transfer project and $800 million in planned investment to upgrade Tartus into a regional trade hub. The deal was signed in Damascus in the presence of Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, marking Syria’s economic reintegration into the region’s logistics map. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Chairman and Group CEO of DP World, framed the concession as a long-term commitment to enabling trade in a recovering economy. The agreement complements DP World’s presence in over seventy-five countries, including operations across the wider Middle East region.
This agreement reflects our long-term commitment to enabling global trade and creating resilient supply chains. We see strong potential in Tartus to serve as a vital trade gateway.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Chairman and Group CEO of DP World, said in the July 2025 Damascus announcement. CMA CGM followed with its own announcement in August 2025, accelerating the second phase of its Latakia Port expansion under a renewed 30-year concession signed on 1 May 2025, with the French carrier committing €200 million and a target of accommodating more than one million TEUs annually. AD Ports Group joined the Latakia picture in November 2025, taking a 20 percent stake in the Latakia International Container Terminal (LICT) for AED 81 million ($22 million) and outlining capacity growth from 250,000 TEUs today to 625,000 TEUs by the end of 2026. The Latakia concession originated in 2009 and was extended for another three decades in May 2025. The political risks remain real: Syria’s new government is barely a year old, and the rail and cross-border mechanics that would make Tartus and Latakia regional IMEC nodes are still being assembled.
Tartus is being rebuilt from a low base, with DP World’s BOT model funding new cargo terminals, free zones, and inland logistics hubs. Daily truck volumes at the Nasib-Jaber crossing with Jordan surged past 1,300 vehicles by November 2025, per Syrian state news, and a March 2026 trilateral agreement allowing direct Jordanian truck traffic into Syria has sharply reduced transit times across the border. Latakia already handles about 95 percent of Syria’s containerized trade, making it the natural anchor for the network’s Levantine leg.
Europe Picks Among Three Ports
Three European ports are competing to host IMEC’s terminal: Piraeus and Thessaloniki in Greece, Trieste in Italy, and Marseille in France, with each candidate suited to a different Mediterranean exit cluster from the network. Piraeus, in which Chinese state-owned COSCO controls a majority stake, sits closest to the Levantine shipping lanes that Syrian ports feed. Trieste, the northernmost harbor of the Mediterranean Sea, is geographically closer to Egypt’s exit cluster and carries a 51 percent rail modal share, the highest of any major European port, giving it unmatched intermodal connectivity to Central European markets including Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Marseille anchors the Western Mediterranean and connects directly to French and Iberian hinterlands.
An Atlantic Council analysis concluded that Greece and Italy make the strongest geographic case, and that the final decision will come down to strategic alignment, investment commitments, and geopolitical concerns, including China’s role at Piraeus. The most plausible answer is that no single port gets the network: Piraeus anchors the Balkans and Black Sea, Trieste anchors Central Europe, and Marseille anchors the Iberian and Western European markets.
The 400-Kilometre Gap Between Saudi and Syrian Rails
The 400-km gap between Syria and Jordan is the most consequential missing link in the network. Saudi Arabia Railways’ North-South line now reaches Al-Haditha on the Jordanian border, and Syrian coastal lines to Tartus and Latakia are operational for freight as of early 2026. Zahi Khalil, director-general and deputy chairman of the Jordan Hijaz Railway at the Jordanian Ministry of Transport, told Arab News at the Global Rail Conference in Abu Dhabi that a Damascus-Amman passenger train could be ready by the end of 2026, with freight traffic following within three to five years.
The Hejaz Railway revival, announced on 9 June 2026 with two memorandums of understanding signed in Riyadh between Turkish Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu and Saudi Minister of Transport Saleh bin Nasser al-Jasser, is the most concrete cross-border project so far to operate on a route that runs through Syrian and Jordanian territory only. Turkey’s transport ministry has said the new overland line from Riyadh to Turkey via Syria and Jordan should be operational within three to four years, with Ankara funding the reconstruction of about thirty kilometres of destroyed track inside Syria as a first concrete step. The two Riyadh MoUs cover railway standards and logistics centres, with a third MoU signed in Amman in April 2026 integrating Mediterranean port capacity and the Gulf of Aqaba into a single logistics network. Trial runs between Turkey and Saudi Arabia via Iraq, completed before the Riyadh MoU, demonstrated the route’s feasibility. The revival, detailed in June 2026 reporting on the Hejaz MoUs, sits as a parallel track to IMEC rather than a substitute for it, and reflects the same political geography that originally froze the Saudi-Israeli overland segment.
Across all four nodes, the Jordanian rail gap is the single most consequential missing link, and the Hejaz revival now on the table is the most concrete cross-border project attempting to close it. The Atlantic Council’s framing makes investment coordination the binding requirement, with the G20 and G7 sherpa processes being where that coordination is supposed to be organized. The remaining question is whether the missing links can be financed and built before the next chokepoint closes, since IMEC is already a network on paper. In a region where three maritime chokepoints have closed simultaneously within the last three years, redundancy stops being optional.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor?
The IMEC is a multimodal transportation and digital corridor agreed at the G20 summit in New Delhi on September 9, 2023, by India, the United States, the European Union, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France, Germany, and Italy. The original plan called for a single spine carrying freight from India across the Gulf and the Levant to Haifa Port in Israel, then by sea to terminals in Greece, Italy, and France. A 2026 Atlantic Council follow-up reframes it as a network of corridors that adds Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria as four additional Mediterranean exit points.
Why did the Strait of Hormuz close in February 2026?
US and Israeli military strikes on Iran began on February 28, 2026, with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps broadcasting VHF warnings that the waterway was closed to all shipping, Container Management reported. UK Maritime Trade Operations and the EU naval mission EUNAVFOR ASPIDES confirmed the warnings, and Bloomberg ship-tracking data showed only a handful of vessels exiting the strait. The closure stranded container traffic at Gulf ports and triggered a parallel halt on parts of the Red Sea.
What did DP World and CMA CGM agree in Syria?
DP World signed a 30-year concession with Syria’s General Authority for Land and Sea Ports on July 13, 2025, with a planned $800 million investment over the life of the concession to develop and operate the Port of Tartus. CMA CGM signed an amended 30-year concession at Latakia Port on May 1, 2025, and committed €200 million in August 2025 to a second-phase expansion targeting more than 1 million TEUs annually. AD Ports Group took a 20 percent stake in the Latakia International Container Terminal in November 2025, with capacity set to grow from 250,000 to 625,000 TEUs by end of 2026.
Where will IMEC enter Europe?
Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Trieste, and Marseille are the candidate terminal ports, with the final decision still unresolved. Greece and Italy have the strongest geographic case; Trieste’s 51 percent rail modal share gives it unmatched connectivity to Central European markets. The European Union has appointed special envoys and held a first coordination meeting in July 2025 between relevant directorate-generals and the three signatory member states.
How much freight could the IMEC network carry?
The original 2025 Atlantic Council analysis sized IMEC at 1.5 million TEUs a year on single-stack cargo rail, with the ability to scale to 3 million TEUs through double-stack operations and additional port integrations. Transshipment via the corridor could compress Asia-Europe travel time by 40 percent, to about twelve days, generating about $5.4 billion in annual savings. The 2026 follow-up network could carry over 70 percent of the $135 billion in estimated India-EU trade through its multi-node Mediterranean exit cluster.
What is the Hejaz Railway revival and how does it relate to IMEC?
Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed two memorandums of understanding in Riyadh on June 9, 2026, to revive the historic Hejaz Railway that once connected Damascus to Medina with a branch to Haifa, running the modern revival through Syria and Jordan only. The route is being designed to function as a contiguous overland freight artery to Turkey and Europe, filling in the missing Jordanian rail gap in the IMEC network, with Damascus-Amman passenger service targeted by the end of 2026 and freight in three to five years.
