US President Donald Trump warned on Friday that he may allow the ceasefire with Iran to lapse by Wednesday unless a long-term agreement to end the war is reached, even as Iran temporarily reopened the Strait of Hormuz and peace talks continued through back channels.
“Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, returning to Washington from Phoenix, Arizona. “So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we have to start dropping bombs again.”
While on the same flight, Trump had offered a more optimistic note, saying there had been “some pretty good news” about Iran and that negotiations were progressing over the weekend. “The main thing is that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, and that supersedes everything else.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi had announced earlier on Friday that the strait was open to all commercial vessels for the duration of the 10-day Israel-Lebanon truce agreed on Thursday. Oil prices fell around 10 per cent and global stocks rose on the news. However, Iran’s parliament speaker and senior negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf warned that the strait “will not remain open” if the US port blockade continued, and Iran stipulated that all vessels must coordinate with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before crossing — a condition that did not exist before the war.
Vessel tracking data showed around 20 ships, including container vessels, bulk carriers and tankers, moving toward the strait on Friday evening, but most turned back for unclear reasons. A cruise ship, the Celestyal Discovery, which had been stranded in Dubai, did cross the strait and was headed to Oman on Saturday morning. Shipping companies said they required further clarifications, including on the risk of mines, before resuming normal transits. The US Navy warned seafarers that the mine threat in parts of the waterway was not fully understood.
Iran’s nuclear programme remains the central obstacle to a deal. At talks in Islamabad last weekend — the highest-level US-Iran negotiations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — the US proposed a 20-year suspension of all Iranian nuclear activity; Tehran countered with a halt of three to five years. Trump told Reuters the US would remove Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles; Iran’s foreign ministry said the material would not be transferred anywhere.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters there had been agreement on unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets as part of any accord. Trump, however, told a rally in Arizona that “no money will exchange hands in any way, shape or form.”
Pakistani army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, the key mediator, has been in Tehran since Wednesday. A Pakistani source said a meeting between the two sides could yield an initial memorandum of understanding, to be followed by a comprehensive agreement within 60 days. Despite Trump’s stated optimism, Iranian sources told Reuters that gaps remained before even a preliminary deal could be reached, while senior clerics struck a defiant tone during Friday prayers. “Our people do not negotiate while being humiliated,” cleric Ahmad Khatami said.
More than a dozen countries said after a video conference on Friday that they were willing to join an international mission to protect shipping in the strait once conditions permit.
The war, which began on 28 February with a US-Israeli attack on Iran, has killed thousands and caused what analysts describe as the worst oil price shock in history, prompting an IMF downgrade of the global economic outlook.
(Reuters)