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Donald Trump has circulated a draft peace agreement for the war with Iran among allies including Israel as both sides try to prevent fresh breaches of the ceasefire escalating out of control and scuppering any deal.
In an attempt to speed up the negotiations, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Mohammad Ishaq Dar, will fly to Washington on Friday to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio.
Tehran targeted a US airbase in Kuwait on Thursday after Washington struck what it described as an Iranian drone operation near the strait of Hormuz, highlighting the fragile situation as both sets of negotiators refuse to cede ground on final points of disagreement. Trump’s Wednesday cabinet had been expected to discuss the deal, but Axios reported the US president as saying he needed a few more days to think about it.
The draft Trump has shared is not vastly different to the one that has been circulating across the Middle East for days, under which the strait of Hormuz would be opened to commercial shipping, the US blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted and Iran would be given access to as much as $12bn (£9bn) in frozen assets.
The aim would be for commercial shipping in the strait to return to pre-war levels within 30 days and for negotiations envisaged to last as long as 60 days to commence on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. This would include discussions about its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, a time-limited suspension of further enrichment and supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Iran would renounce the use of nuclear weapons.
China is pressing for the UN security council to ratify any agreement.
The current scope of the agreement would be deeply unpalatable for Israel, because it defers Iran making any firm nuclear commitments and requires a permanent ceasefire to include Lebanon.
The draft is less specific than Tehran’s version about lifting sanctions on Iran’s oil and petrochemical exports. It also asserts toll-free navigation in the strait of Hormuz.
Iran is trying to negotiate an agreement with Oman separate to any memorandum of understanding that would result in fees imposed for “navigational services”. In remarks that produced no official response from Muscat, Trump threatened on Wednesday to “blow up” Oman if it tried to reach a deal with Tehran that included the imposition of tolls.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ navy issued a statement reasserting its control of the strait, saying that 26 commercial ships and oil tankers had been given permission to pass through the waterway in the past 24 hours.
The IRGC said “seeking permission is mandatory and passage through other routes will be considered as disruption”. It intervened on Wednesday night to prevent four ships trying to sail through the strait with their transponders off. It said two were stopped in place and two forced to turn back.
Any skirmishes so far between the US and Iran have not stopped their indirect contact mediated by Pakistan and Qatar, but if oil tanker operators step up their efforts to pass through the strait without Iranian permission the fragile ceasefire agreed on 8 April could collapse.
Oil prices climbed 2% on Thursday morning, but remained below $100 a barrel.
In Moscow, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, reiterated the demand that frozen assets be released into Iranian bank accounts with no conditions attached.
Washington has countered by imposing sanctions on Iran’s nascent Persian Gulf Strait Authority set up to manage the passage of vessels through the waterway. Tehran has been trying to gain Oman’s agreement to coordinate. The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, threatened on Thursday to target Oman if it helped impose a toll system in the strait, warning of sanctions against any countries involved.
As tensions grow inside Iran about the wisdom of negotiating with Trump, the country’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, told officials not to turn differences into divisions, and to make sure the parliament, which is currently closed, dealt with the public’s economic concerns.
Khamenei said the US and Israel were seeking to “bring the country to its knees. The enemy’s blind plan ... is to create division and destruction in order to compensate for its military defeats,” he said.
Senior diplomats in Oman were reportedly shocked and furious at Trump’s threat on Wednesday.
Oman, seen as a western ally with a commitment to mediation in the Middle East, has been in talks with Iran over the future of the strait, but does not favour an agreement that results in tolls or heavy-handed Iranian interference in free navigation. Omani newspapers did not report Trump’s threat.
In a sign of continuing repression inside Iran, Amnesty International reported that the authorities had arrested more than 6,000 people since the US and Israel launched their offensive on 28 February, including protesters, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities.
