Iran sets new demands to reopen Strait of Hormuz

Iran has laid out a new set of demands for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, even as President Masoud Pezeshkian said the moment is ripe for an agreement and Iran’s foreign minister cautioned that no direct negotiations with Washington are under way.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Saturday that the strait would remain closed until Washington “corrects its behaviour,” according to a statement carried by Iranian state broadcaster IRIB. The waterway has been largely inoperational for months, with thousands of sailors stranded in the region and commercial oil flows disrupted, NBC News reported.

Zolghadr listed six conditions for fully reopening the strait: an end to U.S. threats against Iran and insults to what he called the country’s national and religious values; a permanent end to attacks against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq; the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and withdrawal of U.S. naval and air forces from around Iran; compensation for damage from what he called two “imposed wars”; the lifting of sanctions; and the unconditional release of frozen Iranian assets.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the reopening depended on Washington accepting those conditions and was separate from Iran’s talks with Oman. “Whenever the United States accepts Iran’s conditions, the Strait of Hormuz will certainly be reopened,” IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Tasnim news agency.

The conditions go beyond parts of a June 17 U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, Al Jazeera reported. Reuters, cited by Al Jazeera, reported that the June memorandum treated some of those issues as part of a reciprocal, phased process. Zolghadr is now presenting them as requirements Washington must meet before the strait can fully reopen.

That position also differs from Washington’s latest reported stance. An unnamed U.S. official told Reuters on Friday that the blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted once commercial shipping through Hormuz was restored “without impediments,” with U.S. steps tied to Iran carrying out its commitments. The United States has not publicly responded to Iran’s latest list of demands, according to NBC News.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday there are no ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington. “The intermediaries are still making efforts to find ways to resume negotiations,” he said. He also tempered optimism around Iran’s separate talks with Oman, saying that “changes to maritime routes in the Strait of Hormuz are a technical and legal matter and do not mean that the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened.”

Oman, which is discussing management of the waterway with Iran, said its talks were “proceeding in a positive and constructive atmosphere,” while also condemning attacks on vessels attempting to pass through the strait. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait also condemned an Iranian missile attack on an Abu Dhabi National Oil Company tanker, NBC News reported.

Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Saturday that U.S. officials were working on “how you can actually set up a traffic scheme so that the ships that pass can pass through safely.” He said such a scheme would include demining efforts and assurances from Tehran that it would not fire on transiting vessels.

Pezeshkian, meanwhile, backed efforts to reach an agreement. “There is cohesion, strength and unity in the country, and as far as I know, Iran is considered victorious and powerful in this war,” he said at a news conference broadcast by IRIB. “Now is the best time for an agreement.”

He said Tehran and Washington should have established a mechanism to handle alleged violations of their earlier memorandum rather than allowing disputes to return to military confrontation. “We need to see how to resolve them now, if a solution is possible, which is currently being worked on in the Oman negotiations,” he said, adding that he hoped Iran could move beyond the current state of “neither war nor peace.”