Oil Eases From Near-$100 Peak but Notches ~8% Weekly Gain as Hormuz Transit Falls to 4 Vessels

Brent crude eased to roughly $95/bbl and WTI to near $91/bbl in early Friday trading, pulling back slightly from the intraday near-$100 peak hit two days earlier, but both benchmarks remained on track for one of their steepest weekly gains since the war reignited -- Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance put the week's rise at roughly 7-9% for Brent and up to 10% for WTI, driven by the resumption of US-Iran strikes after a month-long lull and Iran's Sep 3 missile/drone attacks on Kuwait's Ahmad al-Jaber and the UAE's Al Minhad airbases. Independent ship-tracking reinforced the bearish supply picture: Kpler counted just 4 commodity vessels transiting Hormuz on Thursday (Sep 3), well below the 10-day average of about 15, while an Al Jazeera review of tracking data found that US officials' claims of roughly 30-40 nightly transits and 15-17 million barrels/day (versus a roughly 20 million bbl/day pre-war baseline) far exceed the 12-14 daily transits recorded independently by Kpler and Lloyd's List Intelligence over the same period -- a gap analysts attribute to the US including naval-escort and support vessels excluded from commercial tracking databases.