The conditions are back at the center of the war’s diplomacy this week. On Thursday Hossein Taeb, a cleric who ran the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence organization until 2022 and now heads the Basij paramilitary force, gave the most detailed account yet of how messages are moving between the two sides.
Days before the US midterm elections, he said, a Trump representative went to Vladimir Putin, and a Russian envoy then flew to Tehran with a written message for Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The envoy waited for a reply. Khamenei, Taeb said, calmly ordered that it be sent “at a suitable time.”
Then came a phone call between Putin and Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Rezaei’s trip to Moscow, where he handed Putin a letter from Khamenei on November 5.
“Our position is that Iran’s seven conditions must first be met and accepted by the other side,” Taeb said. Only then would Iran decide how, and about what, to negotiate.
His account sits awkwardly beside his colleagues’. Rezaei told Al Mayadeen this week that there are no negotiations of any kind and that reports of talks are “lies.” On X he told Washington to stop “manufacturing FAKE NEWS about imaginary talks” and wrote that it was “time to SURRENDER to the seven conditions.”
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who formally leads Iran’s negotiating team, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that Tehran had given Washington “a clear and transparent response” and was waiting for an official reply.
The US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin in the Kremlin on Thursday, mainly to discuss Ukraine after talks in Abu Dhabi. Neither side has said whether Iran came up.
A list that was never published
Rezaei announced the seven conditions on September 23, after a meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and said they had been put in writing and handed to Pakistan and Qatar. Iran later offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if they were met, then within two.
Iran has never officially released the text. Officials say the conditions grew out of the Islamabad understanding of June, which Hassan Ghashghavi, spokesman of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, says the presidents of both countries signed. Trump has disowned it.
No official list exists. Pieced together from what officials have said, it usually runs: an end to the war on all fronts, especially in Lebanon, the lifting of sanctions, the release of frozen assets, an end to the US naval blockade, compensation for war damage, guarantees against future attacks, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
But the list moves. Vahid Ahmadi, a member of the same committee, includes “the management of the Strait of Hormuz” by Iran under a new route agreed with Oman. Ghalibaf, listing them on Wednesday, added guaranteed waivers for Iranian oil sales. The armed forces chief, Ali Abdollahi, has set out five conditions of his own, including recognition of Iranian authority over Hormuz and a new regional security framework. Some reports include a reduction of US forces in the region. “Sometimes we may mention some conditions,” Rezaei said in September, “but Iran has seven.”
On October 11 Rezaei said Washington had “agreed to some” of them. This week he said there was no response at all.
Why they don’t hold up
An end to war “on all fronts.” This asks Washington to stop wars that Iran’s allies are fighting. Ahmadi says the condition now covers not only Lebanon but “the other resistance fronts,” meaning Hezbollah, the Houthis and militias in Iraq. Lebanon already has its own track. A US-brokered framework between the United States, Israel and Lebanon in June led to direct talks between Israel and Lebanon. Tehran is tying its own deal to a war fought by a group it arms and funds.
Lifting sanctions. No US president can do this alone. Many US sanctions on Iran are written into law by Congress. United Nations sanctions returned in late September 2025 under the nuclear deal’s snapback mechanism. The European Union and Britain impose their own. Lifting sanctions under the 2015 nuclear deal took two years of negotiation. Iran is asking for it as a condition for starting to talk.
Frozen assets. Iran’s own figures do not agree with anyone else’s. Tasnim and the central bank put the total at about $24 billion; other estimates run past $100 billion. Some of the money is tied up in US court judgments won by victims of attacks blamed on Iran, and the $6 billion moved to Qatar in 2023 was frozen again after the Hamas attack on Israel that October.
Ending the blockade. The US blockade of Iranian ports began on April 13, after Iran choked traffic through Hormuz. The condition asks Washington to lift its response while Iran keeps the closure that caused it. Iran’s only offer in return is to reopen a waterway it closed.
Reparations. The government spokeswoman has put Iran’s losses at $270 billion without a breakdown. Trump has rejected paying anything. Tehran is demanding compensation while its own missiles and drones struck its neighbors. The UAE alone absorbed close to 3,000 attacks in the first months of the war, the Financial Times has reported.
Guarantees against attack. No US president can bind his successor, which is the lesson Iranian officials themselves draw from Trump’s exit from the 2015 deal. The same officials who say Washington cannot be trusted are demanding a promise from it.
Iranian control of Hormuz. The strait is an international waterway. A condition that Iran “manage” it, approve routes or collect tolls is not a term for ending a war. It is a claim to a power Iran did not have before the war began.
What is not on the list
The issue Washington says the war was about is missing. Rezaei said this week that the nuclear file “is not under discussion,” and that “not even a particle” of Iran’s enriched uranium would leave the country.
The result is a list that asks Washington to give up every lever it holds, sanctions, the blockade, its forces and the money, before talks begin, while Iran keeps the two things the other side wants most: the closure of Hormuz until the end, and its nuclear material for good.
Who the list is for
Officials have sold the conditions at home as the terms of a victory. Rezaei told Washington it was “time to SURRENDER to the seven conditions Iran has repeatedly set out.” Taeb told his audience that the 40-day war decided the elections in Israel and the United States, and that Trump would have to withdraw his forces or face “a wider social movement” at home.
Ghalibaf said on Wednesday that Tehran wants to end the state of “neither war nor peace,” but that this might come through “sustainable deterrence” rather than talks.
The cost of the stalemate falls on Iranians. Ghalibaf himself complained that the blockade has cut access to food and medicine. Taeb said gasoline output fell to about 102 million liters a day during the war against consumption of about 135 million, and that Iran still imports some seven million liters a day. Inflation reached about 77 percent in October.
