Iran delivered a new proposal for peace talks with the United States via mediator Pakistan, state media reported on Friday, with negotiations between the two sides frozen despite a weeks-long ceasefire.
The IRNA news agency reported that Islamabad received the text of the proposal on Thursday evening.
The war, launched by the United States and Israel with a vast wave of surprise strikes on 28 February, has been on hold since 8 April, but only one failed round of direct talks has taken place between Iranian and US representatives.
In the meantime, Iran has maintained its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off vast amounts of oil, gas and fertiliser from the world economy, while the US has imposed a counterblockade on Iranian ports.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that US President Donald Trump had told security officials to prepare for the blockade to last months, causing oil prices to spike.
Despite the failure to negotiate an end to the war, the ceasefire has held. On Friday, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, a senior figure and well-respected cleric, said, “the Islamic Republic has never shied away from negotiations."
But he added in a video shared by the judiciary’s Mizan Online website, we certainly do not accept imposition, though Tehran does not want a return to war,' he said.
Details of the new Iranian proposal were not immediately available, and the White House declined to comment on ‘private diplomatic conversations.'
But the news site Axios reported that US envoy Steve Witkoff had submitted amendments to a previous proposal earlier this week, seeking to reinject the issue of Tehran’s nuclear programme into the negotiations.
Citing a source familiar with the matter, Axios said they included a demand that Iran not try to move enriched uranium out of sites bombed during a brief war last year or resume any activity there while talks continue.
Optimism after news of the Iranian proposal sent oil prices falling by nearly five per cent for the US benchmark West Texas Intermediate.
However, prices are still roughly 50 per cent above their pre-war levels as traders confront a prolonged closure of Hormuz, while the European Central Bank held interest rates.
An EU official told AFP that the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas had spoken with Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi by phone on Friday about diplomatic efforts to reopen the strait.
