Iran war updates: US says blockade of Iranian ports lifted as part of deal

This live page is closing, but our 24-hour coverage of the conflict continues.

Join us for all the latest developments, analyses and reactions here.

We are about to close this live page. Here’s a recap of the day’s main developments:

• US Vice President Vance said a 60-day negotiating window between Washington and Tehran has begun, as the US military announced it lifted a blockade on Iranian ports.
• Trump said the US expects a total end of hostilities across all fronts, including Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon.
• Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei says he initially disagreed with the US-Iran deal but ultimately approved it after receiving assurances from Iran’s leadership that the country’s interests would be protected.
• Israel’s war on Lebanon has now killed at least 3,912 people since early March as Israeli attacks continued despite the US-Iran deal.
• Eight Muslim-majority nations said they hold Israel responsible for arson attacks on two mosques in the occupied West Bank, which Palestinian officials said were torched by settlers.

Trump has taken to social media to boast about the state of the economy after Washington and Tehran signed the MoU.

In an all-caps post on his social media platform Truth Social, the US president claimed that “oil is flowing” and “the stock markets are roaring, jobs are at records, and prices are dropping”.

While some of Trump’s claims are accurate, others are misleading.

Al Jazeera breaks it down in this explainer.

Iraqi Oil Minister Basem Al-Abadi says the country’s oil fields are ready to resume extraction operations, with exports expected to return gradually to their previous levels, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) reports.

“The oil fields are ready to resume extraction operations,” Al-Abadi said, adding that the “return to normalcy would take place incrementally until previous production rates were reached”.

He added that the Iraqi state agency responsible for marketing the country’s oil, SOMO, “communicated with all customers to nominate the tankers leased and owned by them to load the contractual quantities of Iraqi crude oil through the southern Iraqi ports”.

“Accordingly, the return of exports will be gradual, based on the smoothness of their passage through the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, according to the INA report.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar says he is suspending contact with the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas after reports that she compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s former apartheid system.

In a post on X on Thursday, Saar accused Kallas of displaying a longstanding bias against Israel.

Kallas responded publicly, stressing that the EU remained committed to maintaining relations with Israel, but she did not directly address the apartheid allegation.

You can read more here. 

Verification is an issue for the US and will be partially discussed during the negotiation phase, which is expected to begin over the weekend.

Iran has apparently agreed over the weekend to reduce its stock of uranium. Now the US suggested that this could be downgraded on site, supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example.

Verification is also going to depend on each of the individual clauses. In some cases, there will be some outside sources involved to carry out verification.

There are very clear points in that statement by the Supreme National Security Council about the administration of the Strait of Hormuz, at least during the next 60 days before the signing of a final agreement.

Basically, there will be no fees, and that’s as per clause number five of the MoU.

No fees will be collected, but vessels have to submit requests to an administration called the Persian Gulf Strait Administration, and that administration is tasked with processing those requests and giving guidance to those ships and clearance to go ahead and cross the strait.

From day one of the 60 days, Iran is announcing, in a way, its leverage and control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Joint Maritime Information Center says the maritime security threat level in the Strait of Hormuz has been reduced to moderate.

Earlier this week, the centre had downgraded the threat level to ships transiting the strategic waterway from “severe” to “substantial”.

In comments made on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in France on Wednesday, Trump hailed the deal with Iran as being better than the deal brokered by former US President Barack Obama in 2015, which Trump withdrew from during his first term in 2018.

However, analysts warn it is too soon to determine whether the MoU, which triggers a 60-day negotiation period, will result in a comprehensive deal significantly different from the 18-page Obama-era document, which took several years to negotiate and included the input of nuclear experts.

Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, associate fellow at Chatham House in the UK, told Al Jazeera it would not be “fair” to compare the two at this stage, as the MoU focuses on extending the ceasefire rather than tackling Iran’s nuclear programme in detail.

You can read more here. 

Trump’s interim deal with Iran has faced public criticism from some of his fellow Republicans.

One Republican senator called the framework pact the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades”, another said some reported provisions seemed “ill-advised”, and some pro-Republican commentators also broke with Trump over the agreement.

“Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said on X.

Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said he worried that the MoU “negotiates away” US military successes.

Wicker also said it would be a mistake to force Israel to stand down against Hezbollah in Lebanon and opposed lifting any sanctions on Iran or unfreezing Iranian funds “in exchange for Iran’s mere agreement to negotiate for another 60 days”.

Eight Muslim-majority countries say they hold Israel responsible for arson attacks on two mosques in the occupied West Bank, which Palestinian officials said were torched by settlers.

The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkiye lambasted “the continued and escalating settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank”, pointing to the Great Mosque in Jaljalya village and the Farouk Mosque in the Nobani Farms village north of Ramallah which were set on fire yesterday.

“The Ministers hold Israel – as the occupying power – responsible for these attacks,” they said in the statement.

Vice President Vance is trying to get ahead of what has been a huge amount of criticism, even from Republicans in Congress, about this MoU.

The criticism is that the administration has been too lenient on Iran, giving it far too much and getting back far too little. But Vance has made it very clear that the US will not be giving Iran a single cent.

It’s very important to him and the administration not to be seen giving any tangible benefit to Iran in the course of this deal. … The vice president has been absolutely adamant that this is a good deal for the US despite the mass criticism from many in Congress.

As part of the years‑long US sanctions on Iran, billions of dollars of its assets are held overseas, with estimates putting the total at more than $100bn.

Most of the funds are in countries that have purchased Iranian oil, including Iraq, China, Japan, India, South Korea and Luxembourg. Iran wants the assets released under its new agreement with Washington.

In a discussion with Al Jazeera, Mostafa Khoshcheshm, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Tehran, and Paul Musgrave, associate professor of Government at Georgetown University in Qatar, share their views:

Sultan Barakat, a professor in public policy at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University, has told Al Jazeera that the US can stop supplying weapons to Israel in order to help Lebanon.

The US vice president said earlier that a part of the goal of Washington’s peace agreement with Iran is to allow the Lebanese government to police the south of its country, rather than Hezbollah.

“Internationally, Israel has been largely isolated. Even the majority of the European countries are not willing to supply the Israelis with weapons, so they [the US] could use that card,” he said.

“But they can also strengthen significantly the Lebanese front. So far, they have supported direct talks between the Israelis and the Lebanese. But they can do more economically within Lebanon, and they can do more to strengthen the Lebanese army.”

Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, says that the issue of lifting EU sanctions on Iran will be addressed once there is an Iranian nuclear deal.

“Once the conditions allow, of course, member states will discuss whether the lifting of sanctions is [appropriate], but we are not there yet,” Kallas told reporters ahead of a summit with leaders of EU countries.

The EU currently maintains multilateral sanctions targeting over 700 individuals and entities in Iran, which include travel bans and asset freezes.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council says that the Persian Gulf Strait Authority has been charged with issuing permits as fast as possible for commercial vessels wishing to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

The authority’s management “has been ordered to process and respond to requests with speed and priority in order to fulfil the goals of the memorandum”, according to a statement relayed by Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.

“For 60 days, no fees will be charged from the applicants.”