The Straits of Tiran are the gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, and Tiran Island marks their narrowest, most defensible point. For Israel, the strait was the only maritime door to the south, the path for oil tankers and trade with Asia and East Africa. So when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the strait to Israeli shipping on 22 May 1967, the act was understood on both sides as something more than a blockade. Israel treated it as a casus belli, a cause for war. Within two weeks the Six-Day War had begun, and Israeli troops had seized the island. A line drawn through shallow water had moved armies. Few places on Earth show so plainly how a stretch of sea barely wider than a runway can pull whole countries toward conflict.

Tiran's modern history reads like a deed passed between neighbors who could not quite agree on who owned it. King Abdulaziz Al Saud placed the island under Egyptian administration in 1950, when Saudi Arabia lacked a navy and feared an Israeli advance. Egypt held it until Israel seized the island during the 1956 Suez Crisis and occupied it until March 1957, when international pressure forced a withdrawal. Egypt regained control, then lost the island again to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Egypt recovered it under the 1979 peace treaty, which guaranteed free passage for Israeli ships through the strait. Then, in 2016 and 2017, Egypt agreed to transfer Tiran and its sister island Sanafir back to Saudi Arabia. The handover was contested in Egyptian courts, where lawyers argued the islands had always been Egyptian and the government had merely been a custodian. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ratified the agreement in June 2017 despite the legal challenges. Sovereignty had changed, but the strait's old rules remained: Saudi Arabia pledged to honor the freedom of navigation the treaties had promised.

Long before warships and peace treaties, this scrap of land may have been Iotabe, a toll station described by the Byzantine historian Procopius. Ships bound for India paid duties here. Around the year 473 a Saracen leader named Amorkesos seized the island and pocketed its revenues, until the Byzantine Empire took it back a quarter-century later. Procopius wrote of an autonomous Jewish community that lived on the island into the sixth century, a detail that would be invoked, fifteen hundred years later, in the rhetoric of twentieth-century wars. By the time of the Islamic conquests, the place had fallen silent and empty. Scholars still debate whether Tiran was truly Iotabe or whether another island in the gulf wore that name. The uncertainty suits the island, a guardpost remembered mostly for who passed by, not who stayed.

Strip away the geopolitics and Tiran becomes something quieter: a desert island ringed by some of the Red Sea's most vivid coral, once part of Egypt's Ras Muhammad National Park. BirdLife International has named it an Important Bird Area because it shelters breeding white-eyed gulls, a species found only around the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The reefs that make the surrounding waters a magnet for divers are the same shallows that make the strait so narrow and so strategic. There is an irony in that. The very geography that armies fought over is also what gives the island its beauty, the bright water and the seabirds wheeling above a place where, for most of history, the most important traffic has been passing through rather than coming ashore.