SEPARATE ACCOUNTS OF TALKS
US Vice President JD Vance began talks with Iranian officials on Sunday under the terms of a memorandum of understanding reached last week to extend a tenuous ceasefire from April for at least another 60 days.
The discussions continued until the early hours of Monday.
Just before talks officially began on Sunday, Fox News reported that Trump said he told Iranian officials “you won’t have a country” if they tried to close the strait again.
Trump also reiterated an earlier threat that the US would take over the waterway and possibly charge a toll of its own, Fox News said.
Trump said he agreed to last week’s memorandum of understanding to avert a global economic depression from high oil prices caused by the strait’s closure.
US and Iranian sources provided separate accounts of the discussions in Switzerland.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, citing an informed source, said that after Trump’s threats became public, the Iranian delegation refused to return to the room where talks were held, though messages were still being traded via Pakistani and Qatari mediators.
According to Tasnim’s source, Iranians said that the start of negotiations on nuclear matters required the delivery of other parts of the MOU, including the release of frozen assets and US waivers authorising Iranian oil exports.
“The Iranians never left and are still here meeting and negotiating deep into the night,” a US diplomat involved in the talks told Reuters.
“We’ve talked about the Strait, Lebanon, nuclear issues, and details of implementing the MOU, among other topics.”
The agreement calls for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for global energy shipments, and ending all hostilities, including in Lebanon, where Israel has continued to launch deadly strikes as Iranian ally Hezbollah fires at Israeli targets.
Iran says the US has not met a commitment to halt the war in Lebanon. It said at the weekend it had stopped maritime traffic through the strait and that Sunday’s talks would not cover substantive issues such as its nuclear programme.
At the talks in Switzerland, where US and Iranian officials met in the presence of Qatari mediators, Vance played down the impact of violence in Lebanon, saying progress had been made towards ending hostilities there.
“These things are always a little bit messy,” he said.
Back in the United States, Trump threatened to resume attacks on Iran if it did not rein in its allies.
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump wrote on social media, apparently referring to Hezbollah. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Even as Trump was threatening Iran, Vance told reporters the US president had “asked us to turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran”.
A US diplomat late on Sunday said discussions included “clarifying some of the confusing messaging from Iran on the Strait and building deconfliction mechanisms to ensure the Strait will remain fully open”.
As the US lifted its maritime blockade of Iran, a second container ship docked at Shahid Rajaee port in Bandar Abbas on Monday and began loading its cargo, the director general of Hormozgan Ports and Maritime Organisation said.