The United States is in direct talks with Iranian leaders over terms for ending the war, including exchanges with parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf, President Donald Trump said Monday.
Asked if Ghalibaf was someone the U.S. could work with, Trump said in an interview with the New York Post, “We’re gonna find out … in about a week.”
In a flurry of claims over the past two days, Trump also said that Tehran has agreed to many of the 15 demands he transmitted last week through Pakistani mediators.
“They gave us most of the points,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening as he returned to Washington from a weekend at his Florida estate. “We’re having very good meetings, both directly and indirectly.”
Earlier Sunday, Trump told the Financial Times that the U.S. intends to “take the oil in Iran” and control the vital shipping lane at the Strait of Hormuz, currently blocked by Iranian threats that have stopped nearly all passage to and from the Persian Gulf.
Iran denied virtually all of Trump’s assertions. There have been no “direct” talks, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said Monday in Tehran, only messages sent through intermediaries. He described U.S. demands, which include an end to Iran’s uranium enrichment program, the surrender of more than 900 pounds of highly enriched material and strict limits on ballistic missiles, as “very excessive, unrealistic and irrational.”
In a social media post, Ghalibaf, who has previously denied reports that he was speaking to the U.S., derided the president’s claims as “so-called ‘news’ or ‘Truth’” and “just a setup” to lower the rising cost of oil.
Amid widely disparate accounts of who is talking to whom about what, both sides have begun targeting each other’s energy facilities in a significant escalation of the conflict. Iranian strikes hit Israel’s largest oil refinery in Haifa early Monday, while Iran acknowledged Sunday night attacks on its electricity grid that temporarily disrupted power in Tehran and nearby areas.
As Trump continued to weave between threats to extend the war and reassurances that it was close to ending, he said in a Monday morning post on his Truth Social platform that “great progress” had been achieved in “serious discussions” with a new, “more reasonable” collection of leaders in Iran.
But if a deal was not reached “shortly” and the Strait of Hormuz was not opened, he threatened, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
Kharg Island, off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, is Iran’s main oil shipping terminal.
The question of who is in charge in Iran has loomed over the reports of negotiations. Trump has claimed that regime change has been achieved, saying Sunday that leadership when the war began “was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead, and the third regime we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”
Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed supreme leader after his father was killed in one of the first rounds of Israeli airstrikes, but he has not been seen in person since then amid reports that he was severely wounded. “He may be alive, but he’s obviously very seriously in trouble. He’s seriously wounded,” Trump said Sunday.
Two weeks ago, a strike killed Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council. Dozens of military and intelligence leaders have also been wiped out, including the commander of the navy and the naval intelligence directorate late last week.
Trump told the Financial Times that it was Ghalibaf who had authorized a goodwill “gift” to him last week: permission to allow 10 Pakistani-flagged ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. “He’s the one who authorized the ships to me,” Trump said.
On Sunday, he told reporters on Air Force One: “They gave us as a [additional] tribute … I think out of a sign of respect, 20 boats of oil. Big, big boats of oil going through the Hormuz Strait, and that’s taking place starting tomorrow morning, over the next couple of days, lot of boats.”
“And I would only say that we’re doing extremely well in that negotiation,” Trump said.
On Monday, Iran’s state-owned broadcast company sarcastically dismissed that claim, saying in a post on X that “Iran responded positively to Trump’s threats and reopened the Strait of Hormuz — though only for two Chinese oil tankers!” Until the strait was closed, up to 90 percent of China’s oil supply passed through it.
“They are making threats about controlling the Hormuz Strait in perpetuity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of Tehran in a Monday morning interview with ABC News. “That’s not going to be allowed to happen.” The U.S., he said, is “going to achieve our objectives in a matter of weeks, not months.”
On Fox News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “over time, the U.S. is going to retake control of the straits. And there will be freedom of navigation, whether it is through U.S. escorts or a multinational escort.”
It is unclear who would be part of a multinational flotilla to escort commercial ships through the strait, with U.S. allies doing some weaving of their own on how and when they would participate in a coordinated military effort to keep the shipping lane open.
Trump has said he was not planning to put troops on the ground in Iran, despite reports that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operationsthere. Thousands of American soldiers and Marines newly deployed to the region are already arriving in the Middle East to participate in what U.S. officials have said would be a mixture of Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, should Trump decide to escalate.
Meanwhile, leaders from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, who have offered themselves as mediators between the U.S. and Iran, met Saturday in Islamabad, along with Saudi Arabia. According to a person familiar with their efforts, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive diplomacy, exchanges between the two sides have been only an indirect transmission of nonoverlapping demands, through the government of Pakistan.
In another interview Monday, Rubio appeared somewhat to temper Trump’s claims of direct talks. “There’s messages and some direct talks going on between some inside of Iran and the United States, primarily through mediators,” he told Al Jazeera. “But there’s been some conversation.”
Meanwhile, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, speaking at an energy exhibition in Cairo, sent a direct appeal to Washington. “I say to President Trump, no one but you can stop the war in our region and the Gulf,” he said.
Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.
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