Israel Watch

The United States and Iran reached an agreement on Thursday to extend their ceasefire and lift restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sources told Reuters, though U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to approve it and Iranian state media said it had not been finalized.

According to four sources familiar with the matter, the agreement would extend the truce for another 60 days and allow traffic to flow through the strategic waterway while negotiators tackle difficult issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.

If approved by leadership in Washington and Tehran, it would amount to the biggest step towards peace since the conflict began on February 28. News of the possible agreement came after a round of tit-for-tat attacks between the two countries, the latest such incident since the ceasefire took effect in early April.

Trump has not yet approved the deal, the sources said. The White House declined to comment, and Iran has yet to comment on news of the proposed deal, which was first reported by Axios.

The U.S. military said Monday that it carried out “self-defense” strikes in southern Iran, including on missile launch sites and boats placing mines, even as President Donald Trump said on social media that negotiations with Tehran were “proceeding nicely.”

The strikes were done “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” but the military was “using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire,” Capt. Tim Hawkins, the spokesman for the U.S. military’s Central Command, said in a statement.

Further details were not immediately available, including more specifics on the threats from Iran and what this means for negotiations. There was no official response from Iran, which had sent its parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf to Qatar for negotiations over the possible deal with the U.S.

Iran has agreed in principle to dispose of highly-enriched uranium in negotiations with the U.S., although a deal likely won’t be signed this weekend, a senior Trump administration official said Sunday morning.

The official said the U.S. believes Iran’s supreme leader has approved the template for a deal, but a final agreement still needs to be made before anything is signed. They said it is still an open question as to whether that will come to fruition.

Even before Operation Epic Fury, the Iranian system was “frustratingly slow and opaque,” the official said, and it has only become more so since.

U.S. intelligence shows that Iran’s supreme leader is effectively holed up in an undisclosed location with little access to the outside world and is only reached by a labyrinth of couriers, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The Iranian officials authorized to work with the Trump administration have been having a difficult time communicating inside of their own government system — and it’s a central reason why the details of a potential deal with Iran and past agreements have been slow to emerge,

When the U.S. sends proposed details, the difficulty in reaching the supreme leader means there can be a long delay before the U.S. receives a response, two of the officials said.