Iran ceasefire under threat as Tehran closes Strait of Hormuz again

Associated Press Reporters

The US has demanded that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz after the Islamic Republic closed the waterway in response to Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon.

Tehran’s move cast doubt over whether an already precarious ceasefire to end more than a month of war would hold.

The US and Iran both claimed victory after reaching the agreement, and world leaders expressed relief, even as more drones and missiles hit Iran and Gulf Arab countries.

Israel intensified its attacks in Lebanon, hitting several commercial and residential areas in Beirut without warning. At least 182 people were killed in the highest single-day death toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Another 890 people were wounded, the ministry added.

The fresh violence threatened to scuttle what US vice president JD Vance called a “fragile” deal.

“Aggression towards Lebanon is aggression towards Iran,” General Seyed Majid Mousavi, aerospace commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, wrote on X. He warned that Iranian forces were preparing a “heavy response”.

Iran accused the US of violating three clauses of its framework for a deal.

Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi insisted that an end to the war in Lebanon was part of the ceasefire agreement with the US. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump said the truce did not cover Lebanon.

“The world sees the massacres in Lebanon,” Mr Araghchi wrote on X. “The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the closing of the strait reported in Iranian state media was “completely unacceptable”. She repeated Mr Trump’s “expectation and demand” that the strait be reopened.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said American and Israeli forces had achieved a “capital V military victory” and that the Iranian military no longer posed a significant threat to US forces or the region. The Iranian military said the country forced Israel and the US to accept its “proposed conditions and surrender”.

Unclear

Much about the agreement was unclear as the sides presented vastly different visions of the terms.

— Iran said the deal would allow it to formalise its new practice of charging ships passing through the strait, a crucial transit lane for oil, but the details were not clear, nor was it known whether vessels would feel safe using the channel or whether ship traffic had resumed. It also was unclear whether any other country agreed to this condition. The White House said Mr Trump is opposed to tolls for ship passage.

— Pakistan, which helped mediate the deal, and others said fighting would pause in Lebanon, where Israel has launched a ground invasion against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group. Israel said it would not, and strikes hit Beirut on Wednesday.

— The fate of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes — the elimination of which were major objectives for the US and Israel in going to war — also remained unclear. Mr Trump said the US would work with Iran to remove buried enriched uranium, though Iran did not confirm that.

Mr Trump initially said Iran proposed a “workable” 10-point plan that could help end the war the US and Israel launched on February 28, but when a version in Farsi emerged that indicated Iran would be allowed to continue enriching uranium — which is key to building a nuclear weapon — the US president called it fraudulent without elaborating.

Mr Vance later said the deal was being misrepresented within Iran, though he did not offer details.

Ms Leavitt said Iran’s original 10-point plan was “fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded”, but a new 15-point plan Tehran presented on Tuesday could now “align with our own” proposal for peace.

The White House said Mr Vance would lead the American negotiating team in talks in Pakistan aimed at finding a permanent end to the war. Pakistan said the talks could begin in Islamabad as soon as Friday.

Iran’s demands for ending the war include a withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, the lifting of sanctions and the release of its frozen assets.

United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres’s personal envoy arrived in Iran for talks on “the way forward”.

Israeli Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir said Israel will continue to “utilise every operational opportunity” to strike Hezbollah. The Israeli military said it struck more than 100 targets within 10 minutes on Wednesday across Lebanon, the largest wave of strikes since March 1.

‘Barbaric’

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the attacks as “barbaric”, and Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit accused Israel of “persistently seeking to sabotage” the Iran ceasefire deal.

Hezbollah has not confirmed if it will abide by the ceasefire, though the group has said it was open to giving mediators a chance to secure an agreement. An official said the group would not stop firing at Israel unless Israel agreed to do the same.

Iranian attacks and threats deterred many commercial ships from using the strait, through which 20% of all traded oil and natural gas passes in peacetime. That rocked the world economy and raised the pressure on Mr Trump at home and abroad to find a way out of the standoff.

The ceasefire may formalise a system of charging fees in the strait that Iran instituted — and give it a new source of revenue.

The plan allows Iran and Oman to charge ships, according to a regional official. The official said Iran would use the money for reconstruction.

That would upend decades of precedent treating the strait as an international waterway that was free to transit and is not likely to be acceptable to the Gulf Arab states, which also need to rebuild after repeated Iranian attacks targeting their oil fields.

US-Israeli strikes have battered Iran and its leadership, but they have not entirely eliminated the threats posed by Tehran’s nuclear programme, its ballistic missiles or its support for regional proxies like Hezbollah. The US and Israel said addressing those threats was a key justification for going to war.

Mr Trump said the US would work with Tehran to “dig up and remove” enriched uranium that was buried under joint US-Israeli strikes in June. He added that none of the material had been touched since. There was no confirmation from Iran.

Mr Hegseth told a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday that the US would do “something like” last June’s joint strikes with Israel on Iranian nuclear sites if the country refuses to surrender its enriched uranium voluntarily.

Shortly after the ceasefire announcement, Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all issued warnings about incoming missiles from Iran. That fire stopped for a time, then hostilities appeared to restart.

Oil refinery

An oil refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island came under attack, according to Iranian state television. The island is home to one of the terminals that Iran uses to export oil and gas.

More than 1,900 people had been killed in Iran as of late March, but the government has not updated the toll for days.

In Lebanon, 1,739 people have been killed and 5,873 wounded in just over five weeks since the outbreak of the war, and a million have been displaced. Eleven Israeli soldiers have died.