Trump says US in ‘substantial’ talks with Iran as strikes continue

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States is engaged in serious negotiations with officials in Tehran, but vowed to keep striking Iran for the time being.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States is engaged in serious negotiations with officials in Tehran, but vowed to keep striking Iran for the time being.
“We have very substantial talks going on with respect to Iran, with the right people,” Trump told reporters at a Cabinet meeting, signaling that diplomatic channels remain open despite the ongoing conflict.
The president pointed to what he described as a recent gesture involving oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz as evidence that the interlocutors involved in the discussions hold influence inside Iran’s leadership.
“They said, to show you that we’re real and solid and we’re there, we’re going to let you have eight boats,” Trump said, referring to oil tankers transiting the strategic waterway.
He added that the number later increased to 10 vessels, suggesting to him that those involved in the talks had the authority to deliver concrete steps.
Steve Witkoff, the US envoy involved in the diplomatic effort, said Washington has presented Iran with a 15-point framework for a potential peace agreement, describing it as the basis for ongoing discussions.
Witkoff said the proposal had been circulated through intermediaries and that talks were producing what he called “strong and positive messaging,” though he said the administration would keep the details confidential.
Iranian officials have confirmed that they have received proposals from the United States and said they are reviewing them, though they have not publicly described the terms or acknowledged direct negotiations.
The diplomatic signals come against the backdrop of continued military escalation. Friday will mark four weeks since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, after negotiations that Witkoff said on Thursday had been going nowhere.
It also marks the end of a five-day extension announced by Trump this week to his deadline for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face airstrikes on Iranian power plants.
When asked whether the deadline remained in effect through Friday, Trump declined to give a clear answer.
Efforts to arrange another round of talks also appear uncertain.
Pakistan’s foreign minister said Thursday that expectations for negotiations in Islamabad this weekend may be premature, cooling speculation that the two sides could meet there in the coming days.
Pentagon officials have confirmed that additional troops are being moved into the Middle East, and Axios reported Thursday that Trump has been presented with military options that include strikes on Iranian targets and the potential seizure of strategic islands.
Trump did not rule out further escalation when asked about the possibility of taking control of Iranian oil resources, similar to what the United States attempted in Venezuela.
“That could be an option,” he said.
Brief concern in Turkey this week over a halt in Iranian gas flows quickly gave way to official reassurances, but the episode exposes deeper limits in Iran’s ability to sustain exports even to key regional partners.
On March 24, reports indicated that Iran had suspended natural gas exports to Turkey following damage to facilities at the South Pars gas field after a March 18 strike. The disruption affects flows that accounted for roughly 14% of Turkey’s gas supply in 2025.
While Ankara’s response was swift and reassuring—with officials stressing that storage, diversification, and system flexibility prevented supply problems—the episode reveals a deeper issue on the Iranian side.
The halt is not simply a temporary interruption; it reflects structural constraints within Iran’s gas sector that limit its ability to sustain exports even to key regional partners.
A system under strain
The disruption originates from damage to South Pars, the world’s largest gas field and the backbone of Iran’s energy system. Because most of its output is consumed domestically, Iran operates with minimal export flexibility. Even limited disruptions can force immediate cuts to external deliveries.
Despite holding the world’s second-largest gas reserves, Iran has struggled to translate resource abundance into export capacity due to sanctions, underinvestment, and rising domestic demand.
As a result, exports to Turkey via the Tabriz–Ankara pipeline have often been inconsistent, with repeated disruptions over the past decade linked to technical issues and winter shortages.
In practice, Iran’s gas exports function less as a strategic tool than as a residual output constrained by domestic priorities.
Asymmetry
Energy relations between Iran and Turkey have long been framed as mutually beneficial: Iran gains export revenue while Turkey secures relatively affordable pipeline gas. In reality, the relationship is asymmetrical.
Iranian gas typically accounts for around 7–8 billion cubic meters annually. It is an important but non-dominant share of Turkey’s supply mix. Turkey’s broader portfolio, including Russia, Azerbaijan and LNG imports, limits dependence on any single supplier.
For Iran, by contrast, Turkey represents one of the few stable export outlets available under sanctions.
This imbalance becomes clear during disruptions. While Turkey can replace lost volumes through alternative sources, Iran cannot easily offset lost exports or the reputational damage that follows.
The timing is also significant. Turkey’s long-term gas contract with Iran is due to expire in mid-2026, and renegotiation was already expected to involve reduced volumes. Repeated supply interruptions are likely to strengthen Ankara’s bargaining position and further weaken Iran’s leverage.
Credibility and market impact
Turkey’s ability to absorb the disruption reflects years of diversification. The country consumes more than 50 bcm of gas annually and can draw on multiple pipeline suppliers as well as LNG imports.
Substitution, however, carries economic costs. Iranian pipeline gas has historically been cheaper than spot LNG, meaning replacement supplies raise import expenses.
Spot LNG prices in the Mediterranean have already risen amid broader geopolitical tensions, implying higher energy bills for Turkey if the disruption persists.
Yet these dynamics also underline Iran’s limited influence. Supply interruptions may impose short-term costs, but they do not create dependency. Instead, they highlight Turkey’s ability to adapt while reducing Iran’s strategic relevance over time.
In energy markets, credibility is as important as capacity. Repeated disruptions—whether caused by infrastructure damage, domestic shortages, or external shocks—undermine confidence in Iran as a dependable supplier.
Unlike major exporters such as Qatar or the United States, which maintain surplus capacity and flexible supply chains, Iran operates with structural constraints that limit responsiveness.
Turkey’s gas disruption therefore reveals more about Iran than about Turkey. Despite vast reserves, Iran lacks the infrastructure, investment and flexibility needed to turn those resources into consistent geopolitical influence.
Rather than demonstrating strength, the episode highlights constraint. Turkey’s ability to adapt reduces Iran’s leverage, while recurring supply interruptions erode its credibility as a regional energy partner.
In today’s energy landscape, influence depends not only on resources but on reliability—and that is where Iran continues to fall short.
Iranian police said on Thursday they had blocked 61 bank accounts belonging to users of Starlink satellite internet in the central city of Yazd, as part of a broader crackdown on unauthorized connectivity.
A local police commander said six Starlink devices were seized and six people detained following searches carried out with judicial approval.
Authorities accused the suspects of trading access to the service, sharing information with foreign-based outlets and engaging in activities deemed hostile. The individuals were referred to prosecutors, police said.
The move comes amid a broader wave of arrests across Iran, with authorities detaining dozens in recent days on security-related charges, including alleged links to militant activity, contacts with foreign media and online activity. Officials have also reported seizing weapons, explosives and Starlink devices in multiple provinces.
Starlink is banned in Iran, where authorities have imposed a near-total internet blackout during the war. Monitoring group NetBlocks says connectivity has dropped to around 1% of normal levels, leaving satellite services among the few ways to access the global internet.
From the vantage of the region’s coastal states, where these waters have long mirrored both promise and peril, the current chorus of criticism directed at the United States–Israeli campaign against Iran strikes a discordant note.
“No imminent threat,” declare the sceptics. “An illegal war,” they insist. Such phrases betray a profound misunderstanding of history and responsibility. They treat sovereignty as a shield for aggression and “imminence” as a stopwatch that only starts once the warhead is in flight. We in the region’s Arab states—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman—ought to know better. We have lived with the Iranian threat for forty-seven years.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic has pursued a doctrine of exportable upheaval with methodical persistence. It has armed, trained and directed a transnational network of proxies that stretches from the Levant to the Horn of Africa, from the streets of Baghdad to the tri-border region of South America, and onward into Asia.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the various militias of Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi, and a constellation of smaller but lethal affiliates have served not as rogue actors but as calibrated instruments of Tehran’s will.
These groups have sown chaos on a truly global scale: the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 304 people—including 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers—in the deadliest terrorist attack on Americans until 9/11; the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 truck-bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre, which together claimed more than 114 lives in Argentina’s deadliest terrorist outrage; the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American airmen; the supply of explosively formed penetrators that killed and maimed hundreds of U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq after 2003; the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington; the 2019 Aramco strikes; and the relentless campaigns against international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman.
These are not isolated incidents but chapters in a single, uninterrupted strategy of regional domination and global subversion.
Qassem Soleimani, slain Quds Force commander and architect of the “Axis of Resistance,” openly boasted of this empire. In a message to his American counterpart he declared: “Dear General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.” That assertion, with the regime’s repeated claims of commanding an “Axis of Resistance” spanning multiple Arab capitals, reveals Tehran’s long-standing ambition for hegemony across the region and into the eastern Mediterranean.
To dismiss this record as lacking “imminence” misunderstands the concept in the nuclear age. A responsible leader does not wait until the missile is on the launch pad and the warhead mated. As former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett observed in his recent interview with Christiane Amanpour, “responsible leaders… if you wait for the threat to be imminent, it is too late.”
Ethically, this position is anchored in the just war tradition. As Michael Walzer demonstrates in his seminal work Just and Unjust Wars, states—like individuals—have the moral right to defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not yet actual. “For aggression often begins without shots being fired or borders crossed. Both individuals and states can rightfully defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not actual.” Waiting for the first blow when an adversary possesses both declared intent and advancing nuclear capability is not moral prudence; it is moral abdication.
Iran possesses both the technical capability—advanced uranium enrichment, ballistic-missile production lines, and a clandestine weapons programme long documented by the IAEA—and the explicit intent, voiced repeatedly by its supreme leader and Revolutionary Guard commanders. Add to this an extensive missile arsenal capable of reaching every capital of the surrounding region and beyond, and the calculus changes. Imminence, in the nuclear age, is not a matter of hours but of irreversible momentum.
Nor is the charge of illegality sustainable. Critics invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorises self-defence “if an armed attack occurs.” Yet the Charter itself describes this right as “inherent,” a pre-existing principle of international law that has always encompassed anticipatory action when the necessity is clear and the danger existential.
The classic precedent remains the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from becoming operational—acting before any launch, not after. No credible legal authority has ever branded that decisive intervention unlawful. The same logic governs here. Iran’s decades-long pattern of armed attacks, direct and by proxy, combined with its nuclear advances, satisfies every test of necessity and proportionality under international law.
General Jim Mattis, in his Firing Line interview, dismantled the illegality argument with the clarity of a commander who confronted this threat for decades: one could “probably never make a charge that this is an illegal war” given Iran’s long pattern of direct and proxy assaults on its neighbours, on American forces and on allied interests across the region.
These are not hypothetical grievances; they are a documented record of aggression that previous administrations, through sanctions that proved porous and diplomacy that proved naïve, allowed to fester. The result was not peace but emboldenment.
We in the region did not seek this war, nor did we initiate it. For years we counselled against military confrontation, exercising a restraint that has exceeded even our critics’ expectations. We did so not from illusion but from a pragmatic assessment of the risks: the sudden collapse of the current theocracy, absent any ready alternative, could plunge Iran into civil war, unleashing waves of refugees, radicalism and instability across our borders. Its ballistic-missile arsenal and deeply entrenched proxy networks might fracture into even more dangerous splinter groups, turning a contained threat into a hydra of uncontrolled violence.
Today, we absorb provocations — drone swarms, missile barrages, economic sabotage — against a history of flagrant aggression that had justified retaliation long ago. Yet we are pursuing every diplomatic channel precisely to avert such chaos.
Nonetheless, let there be no mistake: when the Islamic Republic turned its weapons directly and unprovoked against neighbouring territory, our shipping lanes and our citizens, the calculus shifted. Unlimited restraint is no longer prudence; lest it be confused with surrender. The gloves have come off because the alternative — endless appeasement of an aggressor that has already crossed every red line — poses the greater peril.
The campaign now under way is neither precipitous nor unlawful. It is the overdue correction of a strategic imbalance that earlier hesitancy only worsened. It is unfashionable, in some quarters, to acknowledge that President Trump has done what multiple preceding administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—would not or could not. Decades of half-measures allowed Iran’s nuclear programme to advance, its proxy empire to entrench itself, and its ideology of resistance to metastasise.
The cost has been borne disproportionately by the peoples of the region, by the Lebanese and Yemenis caught in proxy crossfire, and by Israelis living under the perpetual shadow of annihilation. To pretend otherwise is to rewrite history in real time.
The states of the region stand ready, as always, for a stable and prosperous Middle East free of hegemonic ambition. We seek no wider conflagration. But we will not feign blindness to the threat that has defined our security landscape for nearly half a century.
True legality and true responsibility lie not in waiting for the perfect casus belli to arrive gift-wrapped in a mushroom cloud, but in acting when the evidence of capability, intent and historical conduct is overwhelming. Iran’s revolution exported war; the present campaign seeks, at long last, to contain it. The states of the region understand this. The world ought to listen.
Residents across Iran report a surge in security measures, nighttime patrols and pro-government rallies that they say are creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation during the ongoing war, according to messages sent to Iran International.
Accounts from multiple cities describe a pattern of increased checkpoints, armed deployments and organized nightly gatherings, with many residents saying the measures appear aimed at controlling the population rather than addressing external threats.
Witnesses said checkpoints have been set up across urban areas, often staffed by masked security personnel and Basij volunteers, some described as very young.
Vehicles carrying heavy weapons, including machine guns, have been stationed at major intersections, with officers pointing weapons toward passing cars.
“Many of them are very young, some as young as teenagers,” one resident said, adding that “the feeling for me and many others is fear.”
Residents said the checkpoints have disrupted daily life, causing heavy traffic and repeated stops. Some described being questioned without clear cause, while others said their phones were searched.
“It feels like they are looking for any small excuse to harass people or even arrest them,” a resident said.
Reports of such measures have come not only from major cities but also smaller towns, where residents described patrol vehicles moving through streets with mounted weapons.
In one account, security forces were said to require drivers to turn off their headlights when entering checkpoints.
Nightly pro-government rallies
Alongside the security presence, residents reported nightly pro-government gatherings in many cities, often involving convoys of vehicles, loudspeakers and armed escorts.
In several locations, groups of supporters were seen moving through streets broadcasting slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” while others chanted religious slogans at high volume.
Residents said the gatherings often continued late into the night or early morning hours.
“These gatherings create more anger than fear,” one resident said, adding that even small groups were accompanied by armed personnel.
Others described loudspeakers mounted on vehicles or in neighborhoods broadcasting chants and songs through the night. “They disrupt the entire neighborhood,” a resident said, describing noise that continued into the early hours.
Some residents said the gatherings included participants wearing symbolic clothing and issuing verbal threats, while others reported that passing cars were stopped and checked if occupants were seen using mobile phones.
Across multiple accounts, residents described the measures as coordinated and sustained over recent weeks, coinciding with intensified military activity in the region.
“There is a clear pattern in how these actions are carried out at night,” one source said, adding that the focus appeared to be on “creating fear and preventing any form of protest.”
While state media has highlighted military activity and messaging around national defense, residents said their primary concerns remain daily living conditions and personal safety.
“We are struggling to get by,” one resident said. “People are worried about their lives, not these displays.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday backed a resolution by Persian Gulf states and Jordan condemning Iran’s attacks on regional countries, after their diplomats told the body they faced an “existential threat” from Tehran’s strikes.
The 47-member council adopted by consensus a motion brought by Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, decrying Iran’s “unprovoked and deliberate” attacks, calling on Tehran to immediately cease them and demanding full and swift reparations for victims.
Kuwait’s ambassador, Naser Abdullah H. M. Alhayen, told the Geneva-based council that Persian Gulf states were confronting “an existential threat to international and regional security” and said Iran’s actions were undermining international law and sovereignty.
The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador, Jamal Jama al Musharakh, said Iran was attempting to destabilize the international order through “reckless adventures of expansionism.”
The resolution came during an emergency session on the widening regional conflict, in which regional states, the European Union and ASEAN members condemned Iran’s attacks in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned that the conflict could draw in countries around the world on an unprecedented scale and urged influential states to use all available means to help end the war.
He said: “Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure must end. If they are deliberate, such attacks may constitute war crimes.”
Iran defended its actions and said more than 1,500 civilians had been killed in US-Israeli strikes so far.
Iran’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, said: “We fight on behalf of all of you against an enemy that, if not restrained today, will be beyond containment tomorrow,” referring to Israel.
Oman, one of the sponsors of the resolution and a previous mediator between Washington and Tehran, was among the few states to note that US-Israeli strikes had preceded Iran’s retaliation.
Ambassador Idris Abdul Rahman Al Khanjari said those strikes “were the spark that ignited the escalation currently affecting the region and the consequences are threatening states and their vital economic interests and their security and stability.”
The council’s motion also asked the UN rights chief to monitor the situation. An independent rights group, the International Service for Human Rights, cautioned against “selective outrage” and called for scrutiny of abuses by all sides.






