President Donald Trump stated that the United States government will sign an agreement this Sunday (14) with Iran to end the war in the Middle East and that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened immediately, but Tehran has not yet confirmed the information.
After a week of new attacks between Iran, on the one hand, and the United States and Israel, on the other, which raised fears of a new regional escalation, Washington and Tehran announced significant advances.
But unknowns persist about a possible agreement and the timetable. The Iranian Fars agency, which cited a “well-informed source,” said on Sunday morning that “the Islamic Republic of Iran has not yet taken nor announced its final decision.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose country is acting as a mediator in the conflict, said on Saturday that the agreement would be signed electronically within the next 24 hours and that details were expected to be discussed next week.
The American president, who has unsuccessfully announced imminent agreements on several occasions, assured that the signing will take place this Sunday, his 80th birthday.
“Immediately after it is signed, the Strait of Hormuz will be OPEN TO EVERYONE,” he wrote on his social network Truth Social, adding that the Iranians “no longer want nuclear weapons.”
In turn, Iranian diplomats mentioned on Saturday the possible signing of an agreement in the coming days, but not on Sunday, according to the state agency IRNA.
A delegation from Qatar, another mediating country in the conflict, arrived this Sunday in Tehran, according to the Iranian press.
Some possible concessions in the agreement provoked criticism among Iranian conservative leaders and, on Saturday, an Iranian agency published a video of dozens of protesters shouting slogans against the foreign minister.
The conflict began on February 28 with attacks by Israel and the United States against Iran, which responded with bombings against American targets in the Gulf countries allied with Washington.
On March 2, Lebanon entered the war with Hezbollah attacks against Israel, which responded with an offensive to “eliminate” the Shiite movement.
Israeli bombings have caused more than 3,700 deaths since March, according to the Lebanese government.
Negotiations stalled
A truce on April 8 stopped most direct attacks between Iran and the United States, but did not include Israel, nor did it halt the war in Lebanon.
Negotiations remain stagnant on several points: the Iranian nuclear program, control of the Strait of Hormuz (crucial for global trade in fuels and agricultural fertilizers), the end of sanctions on Iran and the inclusion of Lebanon in the peace agreement.
According to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the text being negotiated provides for the end of the American blockade of Iranian ports and a new management of the Strait of Hormuz, controlled by Tehran since the beginning of the war.
The Iranian Mehr agency on Friday published a text presented as a 14-point draft protocol, which includes the right to uranium enrichment and the rapid unlocking of $24 billion of Iranian funds frozen abroad, a crucial demand from Iran, which has its economy stifled by sanctions.
Regarding enriched uranium, another point in the negotiations, Trump states that the United States will recover the material “at the appropriate time”.
Until now, Washington has maintained that any agreement should lead to the “dismantling” of Iran’s nuclear program and allow it to recover the material to destroy it and remove it from the country.
Regarding Lebanon, a high-ranking American government official indicated that the country is, indeed, included in the agreement under discussion, as Tehran demanded.
This Sunday, the Israeli Army reported that three drones launched by the Hezbollah group from Lebanon reached the north of the country’s territory, without causing any casualties.
Two far-right Israeli government ministers have called for retaliatory strikes against the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.
