A senior Iranian military officer said on Saturday that renewed fighting with the US was ‘likely’, just 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 8 April, with one failed round of peace talks having taken place in Pakistan.
“At this moment I’m not satisfied with what they’re offering,” Trump told reporters, blaming the stalled talks on tremendous discord within Iran’s leadership.
He said that he faced a choice, like 'blast them or try to make a deal', and he preferred the second option.
On Saturday, Mohammad Jafar Asadi, a senior figure in the Iranian military’s central command, said that a ‘renewed conflict’ between Iran and the United States is likely.
“Evidence has shown that the United States is not committed to any promises or agreements,” he added, in quotes published by Iran’s Fars news agency.
Deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi told diplomats in Tehran that it is now up to the United States to choose between diplomacy and a confrontational approach.
The White House has declined to provide details on the latest Iranian proposal, but the news site Axios reported that US envoy Steve Witkoff had submitted amendments to a previous one, putting Tehran’s nuclear programme back on the negotiating table.
Iran’s mission to the UN pointed to the massive US nuclear arsenal, accusing Washington on Saturday of ‘hypocritical behaviour’ towards Iran’s own atomic ambitions.
There was no legal restriction on the level of uranium enrichment so long as it is conducted under the IAEA’s supervision, as was the case with Iran, it said, using the abbreviation for the UN nuclear watchdog.
News of the new Iranian proposal had briefly pushed oil prices down nearly five per cent, though they remain about 50 per cent above pre-war levels amid the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has maintained a stranglehold on the strait since the war began, choking off major flows of oil, gas and fertiliser to the world economy, while the United States has imposed a counter-blockade on Iranian ports.
The vice speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Nikzad, said that under draft legislation being considered for managing the waterway, 30 per cent of tolls collected would go towards military infrastructure, with the rest earmarked for economic development.
“Managing the Strait of Hormuz is more important than acquiring nuclear weapons,” he added.
Fighting, meanwhile, continued on Saturday in Lebanon, where Israel has carried out deadly strikes despite a separate truce with the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.
The Israeli military said that it had struck dozens of Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon following evacuation warnings for nine villages. Hezbollah, for its part, claimed several attacks targeting Israeli troops.
The Israeli strikes included one in the village of Yaroun on what its military called a ‘religious building', which they damaged.
The French Catholic charity L’Oeuvre d’Orient said that the troops had destroyed a convent belonging to the Salvatorian Sisters, a Greek-Catholic religious order with which the charity is affiliated.
