US Press
Trump tells Axios he is low-keying the war with Iran
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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President Trump said he is easing off the war with Iran rather than escalating it, in an interview with Barak Ravid published by Axios on Sunday as the war neared its sixth month.
"We are low-keying it," Trump said. "We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money."
A week earlier he had been close to ordering a return to major combat operations. In the Oval Office on Monday he said the American navy is the only force controlling the Strait of Hormuz and that it had swept the waterway for Iranian mines.
He also said he had instructed his negotiators to demand compensation firmly, for the people Iran killed and wounded — an inversion of Tehran's own demand for reparations. The Israeli news site Ynet noted that the collapsed memorandum of understanding had contained a clause on a $300 billion fund for Iran's reconstruction.
Israeli officials told the same site they read the shift as economic pressure rather than retreat, and said the unpredictability is what concerns them.
The Palestinian stake in an American attention shift is direct and familiar. Every month Washington spends on Hormuz is a month the Gaza file runs on the Board of Peace's own timetable, with no date attached to the withdrawal it is meant to produce, and the war in Gaza has been quiet without being over.
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