791 Points Offline: How Jebel Ali’s Shutdown Reshapes Global Liner Shipping

When the Strait of Hormuz closed, it did not just shut down a shipping lane. It severed the most connected container port in the Middle East from the global liner network, and took every other Gulf port behind the Strait with it. Jebel Ali’s Liner Shipping Connectivity Index stood at 791 in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to WTCP data — nearly double the next Gulf port. That score reflects not throughput alone, but the depth and diversity of liner connections: the number of carriers calling, the range of services deployed, the vessel capacity allocated, and the frequency of direct connections to other major ports worldwide.

Over three years, Jebel Ali’s LSCI rose from 735 to a peak of 834 in early 2025, as carriers actively concentrated connectivity there while the Red Sea crisis made alternative regional routing more complex. The port was becoming more central to Middle East shipping precisely because disruption elsewhere was funnelling services toward it.

The Hormuz closure now eliminates the very node that carriers had been building their contingency networks around. And Jebel Ali is not alone. Khalifa Port, also in the UAE, carries an LSCI of 416 — the fastest-rising connectivity score in the Gulf, up 21 per cent since early 2023 as Abu Dhabi positioned it as a complementary hub to Jebel Ali. That diversification strategy assumed both ports would remain accessible.

They are now both locked behind the same chokepoint. Qatar’s Port of Hamad registers 217. Dammam, Saudi Arabia’s primary Gulf-facing container terminal, sits at 95. The combined LSCI of ports trapped behind Hormuz exceeds 1,500 points. What remains accessible outside both chokepoints — principally Salalah and Sohar — totals 432. More than three-quarters of the region’s liner connectivity has gone dark.

The operational consequences run deeper than lost port access. Jebel Ali serves as the primary transshipment point connecting Gulf feeder services to mainline Asia-Europe and Asia-Americas rotations. Those feeder networks were designed around Jebel Ali’s schedule — arrival windows, berth slots, container dwell times all calibrated to connect with specific mainline rotations.

When the hub goes offline, the feeders lose their trunk connection. A terminal operator in Kuwait whose feeder vessel is still running has no mainline ship to transfer cargo onto — not because the feeder has stopped, but because the 14,000-TEU vessel it was designed to meet at Jebel Ali is no longer there. A freight forwarder in Dammam holding a booking for cargo destined for Rotterdam faces an immediate question with no good answer: rebook onto what service, via which port, at what rate? Redirecting those feeders to a port outside the Strait does not replicate the connection.

It requires new schedules, new slot agreements, new customs arrangements, and a receiving port with the berth capacity and crane density to handle the transfer. That coordination took decades to build at Jebel Ali. It will not be reassembled elsewhere in weeks. Jeddah, the obvious alternative on the Red Sea side, is also compromised.

The Houthi resumption in the Bab el-Mandeb means Saudi Arabia’s western gateway — which had already seen its LSCI collapse from 565 to 358 during the initial Red Sea crisis and only partially recover to 393 — faces renewed risk just as the Gulf closure pushes carriers to look for options. The two chokepoints are producing compounding, not independent, effects.

For carriers, the minimum response is blank sailings on Gulf-linked rotations. But the deeper problem is whether any Gulf port call remains viable. Services that called Jebel Ali as part of multi-port Gulf loops — picking up at Khalifa, discharging at Hamad, then loading at Jebel Ali for the mainline leg — now face a binary question.

The answer, for most carriers, appears to be a full withdrawal from the Gulf rotation rather than a partial adjustment. What the LSCI data quantifies is a concentration risk the industry acknowledged in theory but never structurally addressed. The Middle East’s container network was built around a single dominant node, with everything else functioning as spokes. When that node fails, the spokes have nowhere to go. The combined connectivity of every remaining port in the region does not approach what Jebel Ali alone provided. Rebuilding that network architecture outside the chokepoints — if it can be done at all — will take years, not weeks.