A senior Iranian military officer said on Saturday that renewed fighting with the US was “likely”, hours after President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with an Iranian negotiating proposal. Iran delivered the new draft to mediator Pakistan on Thursday evening, state media reported, without detailing its contents. The war, launched by the United States and Israel in late February, has been on hold since April 8, with one failed round of peace talks having taken place in Pakistan since...
The economic toll of war is pushing Iran to find a resolution to the hostilities beyond its fragile two-week truce with the US, according to a Middle East-focused think tank leader and businessman who is familiar with the status of the negotiations. However, as the two long-time enemies tried to stare each other down, the Iranian regime believed that their country’s “pain tolerance” was much higher than the Americans’ and this made it unlikely to blink first, he said. In an interview with the...
The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz only hours after its reopening is a tactic by Iran to gain leverage over the United States before possible negotiations, according to Chinese analysts. With the clock counting down to the end of a two-week ceasefire with the US on Wednesday, a deal with Washington was still possible and the likelihood of Tehran imposing a toll on the waterway was low, they added. The assessment came as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced on Saturday that...
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem on Monday urged Lebanon to cancel a planned meeting with Israel in Washington the following day, reiterating his group’s rejection of direct negotiations with its foe. “We reject negotiations with the usurping Israeli entity … We call for a historic and heroic stance by cancelling this negotiating meeting,” Qassem, whose Iran-backed group has been at war with Israel since March 2, said in a televised address. The Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to the United States...
Donald Trump says Iran wants to make a peace deal “very badly” after talks in Islamabad ended without agreement.
J.D. Vance said on Sunday that the US and Iran had failed to reach an agreement after marathon negotiations in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. “We have been at it now for 21 hours, and we’ve had a number of substantive discussions with the Iranians. That’s the good news”, the US vice-president told a press conference. “[The] bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s bad news for Iran, much more than that, it’s bad news for the United States of America.” He left, not...