Tehran sets three conditions for renewed talks with Washington via Qatar
Iran's security chief says an end to the war, unfrozen assets and a lifted naval blockade were relayed to the U.S. through Qatar, with Trump's answer awaited.
Iran has handed its terms for a return to negotiations with the United States to mediators and is now waiting for a reply from President Donald Trump, Mohsen Rezaei, who heads the secretariat of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said in a Saturday interview with Al Jazeera.
The conditions are a complete halt to the war on every front, the release of frozen Iranian assets and the lifting of the naval blockade, Rezaei said. The terms were passed to Washington through Qatar, he said, and talks with Qatari and Pakistani mediators were continuing.
A Change of Strategy After the Memorandum Collapsed
Rezaei said Tehran had concluded it must change its approach to Washington after the United States pulled out of the memorandum of understanding between the two sides. Accepting Iran's conditions would serve U.S. interests, he argued, and said threats from Trump "will yield no results." Iran, he added, was ready for a long and decisive conflict if it came to that.
On the military front, Rezaei said Iran knew where the U.S. military was vulnerable and was more ready than at any previous point to repel American air raids. Iran had tested an anti-ship missile near a U.S. aircraft carrier in recent days, he said, and that if attacked, it would hit U.S. bases and interests across the region with greater force.
Rezaei also turned to Yemen, where fighting between government forces and the Houthis has drawn in Saudi Arabia, saying Tehran wants that war to end. He said he believed the Houthis also want an agreement with Riyadh.
Interior Ministry Points to the Islamabad Agreement
Earlier in the day, Ali Zeynivand, the Interior Ministry's spokesman, said at a press briefing that diplomatic efforts by international parties were still under way to settle the remaining disputes and bring the Islamabad agreement back into force, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. Tehran insists that the other side honor its commitments under that deal, he said. Zeynivand said the deal carried the Supreme National Security Council's approval and the ratification of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. President Masoud Pezeshkian's attendance at Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS meetings, along with continuing consultations, kept Iran's diplomacy active, he said.
U.S. and Israeli forces began large-scale strikes on Iran in February, and Tehran answered with missile and drone strikes on U.S. bases in the region. Pakistan mediated a June agreement between Washington and Tehran to end hostilities, but that deal later faltered over disagreements about the Strait of Hormuz. In Yemen, fighting between the Houthis and government forces resumed once a truce that had held for four years broke down in July, and the Houthis imposed a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea that month, in response to what the group called a Saudi siege of Yemen, a charge Riyadh rejects.
What It Means: Rezaei's three conditions and Zeynivand's reference to the Islamabad agreement point the same way: Tehran is casting any return to the table as a restoration of the June deal on its own terms rather than a fresh negotiation. Two of the three demands, lifting the naval blockade and ending the war on all fronts, bear directly on the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, the two chokepoints through which Gulf crude and LNG reach buyers in Asia and Europe. Iran's stated wish to see the Yemen war end is also notable, because the Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia is one of the fronts Tehran says must close. Whether Washington answers, and how, will decide whether the Qatar-Pakistan channel yields a ceasefire or only another pause.
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