US President Donald Trump said Friday that he was “not satisfied” with a new Iranian negotiating proposal, with peace talks between the two sides frozen despite a weeks-long ceasefire.
Iran delivered the text of the proposal to mediator Pakistan on Thursday evening, the IRNA news agency reported, without offering details as to its contents.
“At this moment I’m not satisfied with what they’re offering,” Trump told reporters, laying blame for the stalled talks with Iran due to “tremendous discord” within its leadership.
“Do we want to go and just blast the hell out of them and finish them forever — or do we want to try and make a deal? I mean, those are the options,” he said when asked about next steps, adding he would “prefer not” to take the first option “on a human basis”.
The war, launched by the United States and Israel with a wave of surprise strikes on February 28, has been on hold since April 8, but only one failed round of direct talks has taken place between Iranian and US representatives.
In the meantime, Iran has maintained its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off vast amounts of oil, gas and fertiliser from the world economy, while the US has imposed a counterblockade on Iranian ports.
Despite the failure to negotiate an end to the war, the ceasefire has held. On Friday, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said “the Islamic Republic has never shied away from negotiations”.
But he added in a video shared by the judiciary’s Mizan Online website, “we certainly do not accept imposition” — though Tehran did not want a return to war.
‘Stuck in purgatory’
The White House has declined to comment on the details of the new Iranian proposal.
But the news site Axios reported that US envoy Steve Witkoff earlier this week had submitted amendments to a previous proposal seeking to reinject the issue of Tehran’s nuclear programme into the negotiations.
Citing a source familiar with the matter, Axios said they included a demand that Iran not try to move enriched uranium out of sites bombed during a brief war last year, or resume any activity there while talks continue.
Optimism after news of the Iranian proposal sent oil prices falling by nearly five percent for US benchmark West Texas Intermediate.
However, prices are still roughly 50 percent above their prewar levels as traders confront the prolonged closure of Hormuz.
An EU official told AFP that the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas had spoken with Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi by phone Friday about diplomatic efforts to reopen the strait.
Tehran resident Amir told Paris-based AFP journalists that the current stalemate in talks “feels like we are stuck in purgatory”.
Still, the 40-year-old held out little hope for the new proposal.
“This is all to waste time,” he said, predicting the US and Israel “will attack again”.