President Donald Trump on Friday said Iranian officials have asked to continue negotiations on an end to the war he started five months ago even as he declared the shaky ceasefire reached three weeks ago to be “over.”
Writing on Truth Social, he said Iran “has asked us to continue ‘talks’” and acknowledged that the United States had agreed to engage.
But the president also said Washington has informed Tehran “in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!”
His comments come after U.S. Central Command forces struck Iranian islands, ports and infrastructure for two consecutive nights to retaliate for what the U.S. described as Iranian attacks on international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran has claimed that American weapons hit in an area near a nuclear power plant on Thursday as both sides ramped up attacks following a dramatic collapse in talks to end the war.
Ehsan Jahanian, the deputy governor of Bushehr, told Iranian state media that the perimeter of the Russian-built plant had been struck during fresh attacks across the southern coastal province.
Officials also said the U.S. attacked railways and disrupted passenger train service from Tehran to Mashhad, where Iranians had been gathering for the funeral of late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who had been killed in airstrikes during the opening days of the war.
As the ceasefire imploded, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz again ground to a halt after Iran’s top negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, declared that the waterway “will be reopened only under Iranian arrangements, not through US threats.”
In retaliation, Iran said it had renewed strikes on Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and Jordan said it had intercepted eight missiles from Iran.
Prior to the escalation, daily traffic had risen to its highest levels since the war's outbreak, averaging 40 ships transiting the strait.
By the early hours of Thursday morning, only two tankers had sailed through the waterway.
Despite the escalation on the ground, and Trump saying on Wednesday he believed the ceasefire was “over”, the president told reporter aboard Air Force One while returning from Turkey this week that the regime had called him and wanted “to make a deal so badly” in the wake of the latest strikes.
But he also expressed doubt that any diplomacy would bear fruit in the end.
“I just don’t know if they’re worthy of making a deal. I don’t know that they’re going to honor the deal,” he said.
“Anything that happens is going to be over very quickly ... and will only make it safer, including for oil.”
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