The House voted on Thursday on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that requires the Pentagon to consider the setting up of an Incidents at Sea Agreement with Iran.

The amendment had been proposed by Representatives John Conyers (D-MI) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and faced no opposition from the 435 sitting representatives. The US House of Representatives is majority-Republican.

The NDAA, incorporating the Thursday amendment, was itself passed at the House 344 to 81 on Friday. The bill, which authorizes defense budget and policy, approved 696 billion dollars in military spending for fiscal year 2018.

The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a version of the bill in June, but the full Senate is yet to vote on the bill.

According to the Conyers and Gallego amendment, the US Department of Defense “shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report assessing the relative merits of a multilateral or bilateral Incidents at Sea military-to-military agreement between the United States, the Government of Iran, and other countries operating in the Persian Gulf aimed at preventing accidental naval conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.”

The “appropriate committees” are defined in the amendment as the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, as well as the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives.

Iran maintains sovereign territory in the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, but under a regime of passage, Iran allows international innocent passage through parts of its maritime territory.

The US, an extra-regional power, has heavy military presence in the region, including in the Persian Gulf, and US warships routinely sail in the waters. But the US military also ratchets up tensions in the region by occasionally alleging that its vessels come under “harassment” by Iranian patrol boats in the area.