Tehran (AFP) – Iran’s foreign minister said Friday that a deal with the United States to end the Middle East war was closer than ever, as a senior US official and key mediator Pakistan both expressed mounting optimism for an elusive agreement. Publicly, however, the warring sides’ negotiating positions remain far apart, with Iranian state media publishing a breakdown of what was purportedly on the table that stood sharply at odds with Washington’s longstanding red lines.
Over weeks of halting negotiations — marked by threats and exchanges of fire despite an April truce — US President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that a deal was all but signed, only for talks to drag on. The president had repeated that assertion on Thursday, but on Friday lashed out at Tehran, accusing it of negotiating in bad faith following the Iranian media reports. In a social media post, Trump dismissed the Iranian accounts as having “NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing”. “Very dishonorable people to deal with,” he continued. “They better get their act together, and FAST!”
But Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to play down the row. “The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding has never been closer,” he wrote in a social media post, referring to the Pakistani capital that hosted previous US-Iran talks. “Pending its finalization, the media should refrain from entering speculation about its content,” he added. Trump later posted a screenshot of Araghchi’s message on his own feed.
Disputing Trump’s “bad faith” accusation, foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said an agreement had now been reached with Washington “on most points”. He added that a meeting was also currently underway in Iran to finalize a consensus. “We are in the last phases of arriving at a conclusion,” he said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose country has been a key mediator since the initial talks, confirmed that “a final, agreed-upon text of the peace deal has been reached”. “Peace has never been as close as it is now,” Sharif said, while acknowledging “incessant misinformation” surrounding the deal. A senior US official also voiced optimism that the parties would be “signing this agreement over the next few days”. “If I were to give you a confidence that we were going to be signing this agreement, I maybe would have said 75 percent this morning, it’s probably more like 80-85 percent now, but it’s not 100 percent,” the official told reporters in a call.
The Swiss foreign ministry on Friday said it had been in contact with both the US and Iran, and had “proposed Switzerland as the venue for a possible signing, should the parties agree to it”. US ally Israel has said that Trump had promised it that any agreement would see Iran stripped of its enriched nuclear material, but Tehran’s official IRNA news agency said this was not even on the table.
According to IRNA’s account, after an initial agreement is signed, Iran and the US would hold 60 more days of talks and “Iran’s right to enrich uranium and the retention of enriched material…will be emphasised with a view to their inclusion in the final agreement”. Beyond this, according to IRNA, Iran would insist on managing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the key maritime trade route carrying oil and gas from the Gulf, which Tehran has blockaded since the outbreak of the war.
On Friday, Iran’s Mehr news agency, quoting a source close to the country’s negotiating team, said the deal would also see the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets. But those details clashed with a summary offered by a senior White House official, who told AFP Iran had agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its enriched uranium stockpile, and reopen the strait — and that Tehran would not see any of its frozen funds returned until it had honored these commitments. US Vice President JD Vance likewise said Iran was “not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released for simply signing a deal or attending a meeting”. But, he added, if “Iran meets its obligations, then economic benefits will flow to them and to the entire region”.
In Tehran, some ordinary Iranians feared a deal would entrench the authorities’ rule. “I am not sure how I feel,” a 29-year-old cafe worker told AFP on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The main purpose of this war was for the US to remove the system and this did not happen. So what does a deal do?”
© 2024 AFP
