Iran stays in peace talks despite US strikes, as nuclear deal nears critical juncture

On Tuesday, the Iranian foreign ministry issued a sharp rebuke of American bombing runs that had targeted missile installations and mine-laying operations in the Strait of Hormuz. The strikes had killed four Iranian soldiers. Tehran called the action a violation of the ceasefire and an expression of bad faith. Yet the Iranians did not walk away from the negotiating table in Doha, where Pakistan and Qatar were mediating what could become a historic agreement between two countries that had been at war since late February.

The restraint was deliberate. Iran's military made no announcement of immediate retaliation, a signal that the leadership in Tehran understood something crucial: the talks had reached a moment where one wrong move could collapse everything. The Iranian parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, remained in Doha for a second consecutive day, working through the mechanics of how to unlock more than twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets and secure sanctions relief on oil and petrochemical exports during a sixty-day window meant for negotiating new constraints on Iran's nuclear program. Oil futures climbed four percent on news of the renewed fighting, a reminder that markets were watching the fragility of the moment.

The core dispute had narrowed to a single issue: the frozen assets. Both sides had accumulated enough mistrust that neither would move forward on other matters—the future of the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear program itself—without first seeing the money transferred. One Iranian parliamentarian, Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, claimed that a plan to move twelve billion dollars through Qatar and then Russia to Iran had been blocked by the United States at the last moment. He issued a warning with an edge of menace: if the war restarted, Iran knew where Trump's lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, were staying in Doha and Dubai.

In Washington, Donald Trump had planned a rare cabinet meeting at Camp David but postponed it, citing bad weather. He continued to face questions about whether any peace agreement could satisfy the objectives he had set when the war began. On Truth Social, he recycled a rambling post from the previous week, imagining a scenario in which Iran surrendered completely—navy destroyed, air force gone, military disarmed—and still Democrats and the media would claim Tehran had won. The post captured something real about the political pressure all sides were under. Hardliners in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem were all pushing their negotiators not to give ground. Mahmoud Nabavian, a member of Iran's parliamentary security commission, insisted that any agreement must preserve Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. But Ghalibaf, freshly reelected as speaker by an overwhelming margin, had room to maneuver past this opposition, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the agreement itself was supposed to end the war but not define the peace. A separate thirty-day window had been carved out for the United States to lift its blockade of Iranian oil ports and for Iran to allow commercial shipping through the Strait to resume at pre-war levels. Yet even as negotiators worked toward this framework, the fighting was not winding down. Israel was expanding operations into southern Lebanon, striking north of the yellow line to target Hezbollah's missile positions. On Tuesday evening, the Israeli military issued evacuation warnings for nineteen villages in southern Lebanon. Hours later, the Lebanese health ministry reported that Israeli strikes had killed thirty-one people and wounded forty.

Iran's supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had assumed power after his father was killed in the opening strikes of the war, issued a statement marking the start of the hajj. He projected confidence, claiming the tide of history was moving in Iran's favor and predicting the elimination of Israel by 2040. He had not been seen in public or released any recorded audio since his elevation in March. His words were a counterpoint to Trump's vision of normalized relations between Arab states, Turkey, and Iran with Israel. Khamenei spoke instead of American bases being driven from the region and of Israel approaching its final stages. The gap between these two visions—one of regional integration, the other of existential struggle—hung over the negotiations in Doha as the two sides tried to find a way to end a war that had already reshaped the Middle East.