In Brief
- Iranian officials met with Qatari prime minister to discuss US deal.
- The two sides remain at odds on several issues including the Strait of Hormuz, enriched uranium and Israel's war in Lebanon.
Iran’s top negotiator and its foreign minister held talks with Qatar’s prime minister on Tuesday AEST, after Iran and US both played down hopes for an imminent breakthrough over the three-month-old war in the Middle East.
The talks between Iran and Qatar focused primarily on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran’s central bank governor also attended the meeting to discuss the potential release of frozen Iranian funds as part of a final deal.
On Tuesday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio told reporters that the US would give diplomacy every chance to succeed before considering whether to deal with Iran in "another way".
"[There was a] pretty solid thing on the table in terms of their ability to open up the strait (of Hormuz), get the strait open, enter into a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter, and hopefully we can pull it off," Rubio said.
US President Donald Trump has said his key aim in the war is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon with its highly enriched uranium. Iran has consistently denied it has plans to do that.
Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said earlier that nuclear issues would only be negotiated on if the framework accord is agreed first.
Baghaei said the potential Iran deal contained no specific details on management of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied gas usually flows.
Iran will not charge tolls for ships to pass through but there will be a cost for services offered such as navigation and steps to protect the environment, he said, under a protocol to be agreed with Oman, which lies on the opposite shore of the waterway.
The two sides remain at odds on several other issues, such as Israel's war in Lebanon with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Iran's demands for the lifting of sanctions and the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian oil revenues frozen in foreign banks.
As efforts to reach a deal continued on Monday (local time), Iran said it had downed a "hostile" stealth drone using a new air defence system, Iranian news agencies reported, without saying where it had come from.
Trump links normalising ties with Israel to Iran peace deal
Trump said on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia and other Muslim-majority nations must normalise ties with Israel as part of efforts to reach a deal with Iran, adding fresh uncertainty to protracted peace negotiations.
The US leader said it should be mandatory for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, Türkiye and Jordan to sign up to the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements brokered in 2020 with nations historically hostile to Israel.
"After all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords," he wrote in a lengthy social media post.
"Those Countries discussed are Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates (already a Member!), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain (already a Member!)."
Trump said he had spoken to the leaders of those countries on Saturday about efforts to end the war with Iran. Bahrain and the UAE have already signed the accords, along with Morocco and Sudan.
But while the accords were welcomed by some as a foreign policy success, they remain deeply unpopular among the public in many parts of the Middle East, not least because they do not tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The issue is fraught as countries like Gulf heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Qatar have said they will never normalise ties with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is created.
Saudi Arabia's position on the Palestinian issue remains unchanged, a Saudi source told Riyadh-based broadcaster Al Arabiya on Monday, adding that "there needs to be an irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state."
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