Iran gives US four-to-five-day deadline over strait of Hormuz
A senior Iranian security official says Washington has four to five days to meet Tehran's conditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz, as UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband held his first meeting with Iran's foreign minister in a year.
UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband met Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi in New York for the first time, as Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's supreme national security council, said the United States has been given four to five days to meet Tehran's conditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz. It remains unclear what Iran would do if the deadline passes without a US response.
A faction within Iran's leadership reportedly favours escalating pressure on a politically weakened US president rather than allowing the standoff to continue indefinitely. Brent crude was trading at around $107 a barrel on Thursday.
Araghchi met US special envoy Steve Witkoff earlier in the week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to discuss Iran's terms and the timeframe for a US response. Rezaei said president Masoud Pezeshkian and Araghchi travelled to New York to communicate seven previously agreed conditions rather than negotiate new ones, including the lifting of US sanctions and an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Israeli military activity in southern Lebanon. Iran insists all seven conditions must be met simultaneously and in full, and that Washington must now act first rather than continue talking.
The meeting between Miliband and Araghchi was the first between UK and Iranian ministers in a year, and the first since Britain proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation in July, a move that strained relations further. Miliband reaffirmed UK support for freedom of navigation through the strait and for ally Saudi Arabia, while pressing Iran over threats to Jewish communities in Britain and demanding consular access to a British couple sentenced to ten years in prison in Tehran.
European diplomats reported no sign of a breakthrough in US-Iran talks, a view echoed by US secretary of state Marco Rubio. Some Revolutionary Guard officers have linked the Hormuz dispute to the Bab al-Mandab strait near Yemen, controlled by Iran-backed Houthi forces, warning of a possible new front opening in the Red Sea.
