GoKawiilThe US and Iran agreed to a two-week conditional ceasefire on Tuesday evening, which included a temporary and conditional reopening of the strait of Hormuz, after a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan, canceling an ultimatum from Donald Trump for Iran to surrender or face widespread destruction.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire agreement came less than two hours before the US president’s self-imposed 8pm Eastern time deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a move that legal scholars, as well as officials from numerous countries and the pope, had warned could constitute war crimes.
Just hours earlier, Trump had written on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” American B-52 bombers were reported to be en route to Iran before the ceasefire agreement was announced.
But by Tuesday evening, Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement had been mediated through Pakistan, whose prime minister Shehbaz Sharif had requested the two-week peace in order to “allow diplomacy to run its course”.
Trump wrote in a post that “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks”.
For several hours afterwards, Israel’s position or agreement with the deal was unclear. But just before midnight ET, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel backed the US ceasefire with Iran but that the deal did not cover fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon. His office said Israel also supported US efforts to ensure Iran no longer posed a nuclear or missile threat.
The ceasefire process was clouded in uncertainty after Iran released two different versions of the 10-point plan intended to be the basis for negotiations, and which Trump said was a “workable basis on which to negotiate”.
In the version released in Farsi, Iran included the phrase “acceptance of enrichment” for its nuclear program. But for reasons that remain unclear, that phrase was missing in English versions shared by Iranian diplomats to journalists.
Pakistan has invited the US and Iran to talks in Islamabad on Friday. Tehran said it would attend, but Washington had yet to publicly accept the invitation.
In a telephone call with Agence France-Presse, Trump said he believed China had persuaded Iran to negotiate, and said Tehran’s enriched uranium would be “perfectly taken care of”, without providing more detail.
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