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The Times reports Washington and Tehran blew past their own deadline
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The war Donald Trump said he had ended in June has now outlasted the deadline he set for ending it.
The New York Times reported on Monday that the United States and Iran have blown through the deadline the two governments gave themselves for a broad agreement to finish the war and limit Iran's nuclear programme. The president said in June that the ceasefire would deliver both. The paper found the two sides still far apart.
The framework was a fourteen-point memorandum negotiated in Islamabad and signed on 17 June, which opened a sixty-day window for talks on a longer nuclear agreement, extendable if both sides wanted it, the Abu Dhabi paper The National reported.
The strait, not the centrifuges#
What broke the framework was the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's oil and gas moves. The nuclear question was pushed down the agenda.
"Pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz strait a territory of the United States," Trump said, adding that "there's nobody to negotiate with". Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, answered that the waterway "was Iran's, is Iran's, and will remain Iran's". Tehran's formal position is that the sixty days never began.
For Palestinian readers the connection is not abstract. The envoys carrying the Iran file — Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Nickolay Mladenov — are the same men who spent Sunday in Cairo trying to restart the Gaza roadmap, and the Gulf states pressing Washington to enforce that roadmap are the states living under the Hormuz standoff.
An administration walking into a wider regional war has less attention to spare for a Gaza ceasefire whose second phase has not started. Monday's lapsed deadline is the measure of how much of Washington's diplomatic energy the Iran file is now taking.
