After a little over a month of fighting, the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire last week, but talks aimed at extending the agreement collapsed on Sunday morning. Shortly after the negotiations failed, U.S. President Donald Trump declared a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, alongside other measures meant to ratchet up the pressure on Iran to agree to the U.S.’s terms.
The ceasefire was announced shortly before a deadline set by Trump for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to all ships was set to run out. The president had threatened to destroy Iranian energy facilities and bridges if his demand wasn’t met. Trump backed down from his threat after extensive efforts by Pakistani mediators and diplomats from several other countries, including China.
American and Iranian delegations met in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Saturday, but after around 20 hours of negotiations, failed to reach an agreement. Even with the collapse of the talks and Trump’s declaration of the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, it’s still not certain that the ceasefire is officially over, as vague and even contradictory reports emerged about the terms of the ceasefire and the exact demands and red lines of both the U.S. and Iran in the negotiations.
What did the ceasefire agreement say?
Nearly a week after it took effect, we still don’t know many specifics about the ceasefire agreement, although both sides have published some sparse details. No official document detailing the deal has been released, and some reports indicated that the ceasefire was based solely on a verbal agreement.
Both Iran and the U.S. stated that the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to international maritime traffic was a condition of the ceasefire. The two sides also agreed to hold further talks in Pakistan during the two-week ceasefire to try and reach a lasting agreement. Beyond these two conditions, no further details have been confirmed by both sides.
There was significant confusion about whether passage through the Strait had to be free or whether Iran would be allowed to charge a toll on all ships transiting the waterway. Some Iranian reports mentioned a toll, as well as U.S. recognition of Iran’s control over the entire waterway. However, other Iranian reports didn’t include these conditions, and, so far, U.S. officials have avoided commenting on the claims in public statements.
Additionally, despite the entry of the ceasefire on Tuesday night, Iranian strikes on Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain continued until Wednesday afternoon. Iranian media also appeared to accuse the UAE or another Gulf state of striking one of its oil refineries after the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday morning, although official Iranian statements didn’t name a specific country.
Is Lebanon included or not?
A major sticking point quickly emerged in Lebanon. Both Iran and Pakistan said that the U.S. agreed to have Israel stop strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of the ceasefire. However, Israel and the U.S. said that no such condition was agreed to.
On Wednesday afternoon, the IDF launched a wave of strikes in the Beirut area and southern and eastern Lebanon, targeting over 100 locations in the span of ten minutes in an operation dubbed “Eternal Darkness.” The targets included Hezbollah headquarters and missile and drone facilities. Lebanese authorities reported that over 200 people were killed in the strikes.
Iran responded with outrage, describing the strikes as a violation of the ceasefire and declaring that they would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed as a result. Iran’s Speaker of Parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, claimed that Hezbollah and the rest of Iran’s proxy network were an “inseparable part of the ceasefire,” warning that “ceasefire violations carry explicit costs and strong responses.” Ghalibaf has reportedly been the main Iranian official negotiating with the U.S. in recent weeks and led the Iranian delegation at the talks in Pakistan.
Iranian deputy foreign minister Saeed Khatibzadeh threatened on Thursday to pull out of the talks planned for Friday in Pakistan if Israel did not halt its strikes on Hezbollah. He added that Iran was on the verge of retaliating on Wednesday, but held off after the U.S. said it was pressing Israel to stop the strikes.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance affirmed on Wednesday that Israel had agreed to halt operations in Lebanon during the negotiations in Pakistan, insisting nevertheless that the ceasefire agreement had not included any clause about Lebanon.
Despite these statements, clashes between Hezbollah and Israel have continued, with Israel launching new strikes in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah intensifying its rocket fire toward northern Israel and central Israel.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Thursday that Israel planned to demolish villages in southern Lebanon located along the Lebanese-Israeli border. He added that the IDF would set up several defensive lines and take control of the entire area south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, though he did not clarify whether the IDF would retain control of this area even after the war ends.
Later on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would be launching direct negotiations with Lebanon “as soon as possible,” with the goal of reaching an agreement to disarm Hezbollah and “establishing peaceful relations” between the two states.
As of Monday morning, the Strait of Hormuz was still mostly closed, with only a handful of ships reportedly transiting through the waterway. Iranian media also continued to discuss plans to demand fees of up to several million dollars from every ship trying to cross the Strait.
Despite the unresolved dispute over the Strait, both delegations ultimately made their way to Islamabad. American negotiators arrived in Pakistan on Friday morning, but the Iranian team’s arrival was delayed. Talks began on Saturday and continued for about 20 hours. On Sunday morning, Vance announced that the talks were ending and that a deal had not been reached. He and the other American negotiators left Islamabad shortly afterwards.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on, and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on,” Vance said.
“The question is, ‘Do we see a fundamental commitment of will for the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon, not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term?’ We haven’t seen that yet, we hope we will,” the vice president added.
Iranian officials also confirmed that the negotiations had ended, with Ghalibaf stating that the U.S. “ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation.”
“America has understood our logic and principles, and now it’s time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not?” Ghalibaf added.
Why did the talks collapse?
The talks in Pakistan were conducted on the basis of a 15-point U.S. proposal and a 10-point Iranian proposal.
The exact details of America’s 15-point proposal have not been published, leaving the only information available about the U.S.’s red lines to leaks and sparse, often contradictory details in public statements. There are, however, some consistent factors.
Most reports and statements agree that the proposal demands significant concessions concerning Iran’s nuclear program, including a ban on uranium enrichment, the removal of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, free and safe movement through the Strait of Hormuz, and limits on Iran’s ballistic missile program. The reports also largely agree that the U.S. proposal would include sanctions relief and other economic benefits.
Iranian media published a 10-point plan, which included demands to give Iran full control over the Strait of Hormuz, end all international sanctions on the country, and allow continued uranium enrichment in Iran. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said the plan also included conditions such as the withdrawal of all American forces from the entire Middle East, reparation payments for all damages caused in Iran, and a requirement that any final agreement be encoded in a binding U.N. Security Council resolution.
Notably, the conditions concerning domestic uranium enrichment and reparation payments appear in the Farsi version of the proposal shared by Iranian officials, but not in the English one.
U.S. officials have insisted that the proposal they received and agreed to use as a basis for the negotiations was different from the one published by Iran. Trump accused media outlets sharing the publicly available version of the proposal of being “total Fraudsters, Charlatans, and WORSE.”
Since no details have been published about the alleged alternate version of the 10-point plan the U.S. says it received, there’s no way to tell if Iran has conceded any of the points it’s insisted on in the public version of the proposal. If the published version is the one the U.S. received, the gaps between the two sides are wide, possibly wider than before the war.
Several of the same disagreements that led to the pre-war nuclear talks collapsing are present in both proposals.
The question of uranium enrichment remains the sharpest point of dispute. For the U.S., continued enrichment inside Iran is unacceptable; for Iran, halting it is a red line. Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for regional proxy groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis are similarly contested. The U.S. had demanded before the war that Iran limit their missile program and halt support for proxy groups, but these terms were flatly rejected by Iran. These demands appear unchanged in the current proposals.
On top of these existing fault lines, the two sides are now also far apart on issues that are new to this round of talks. Iran is demanding full control over the Strait of Hormuz and the right to levy tolls on passing ships, demands that American officials have rejected. Iran is also demanding reparations for war damages and a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, demands Washington has so far declined to address publicly at all.
After the talks collapsed on Sunday, the New York Times reported that the main sticking points in the negotiations were the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, disagreements over how to handle Iran’s stockpile of around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and Iran’s demand for the release of approximately $27 billion in frozen assets held abroad.
In his statement after the talks collapsed, Trump announced that the U.S. Navy would be blocking all ships from entering or leaving the Strait of Hormuz. He added that the Navy would also stop any ship that had paid a toll to Iran to pass through the waterway and would begin destroying any mines Iran had placed. The president warned that any Iranian attacks on ships in the area would be retaliated against.
Trump also claimed that other countries would help the U.S. implement the blockade, but did not say which countries had agreed to do so.
“Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION. They want money and, more importantly, they want Nuclear. Additionally and, at an appropriate moment, we are fully ‘LOCKED AND LOADED,’ and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!” Trump warned.
Concerning the failure of the talks, Trump said that while some agreements had been reached Iran was still unwilling to “give up its nuclear ambitions.”
“In many ways, the points that were agreed to are better than us continuing our Military Operations to conclusion, but all of those points don’t matter compared to allowing Nuclear Power to be in the hands of such volatile, difficult, unpredictable people,” the president added.
U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for operations in the Middle East, later clarified that the blockade would only apply to ships travelling to or from Iranian ports.
With the negotiations halted, both sides face a stark choice: return to war, or compromise on the red lines that have so far made a deal impossible. Until one or both sides proves willing to do the latter, there is little reason to expect a different outcome. Analysts and experts were divided on whether the peace would hold regardless of the collapse of talks and on whether a return to war would be preferable.
Experts debate whether the war will, or should, resume
Danny Citrinowicz, a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, warned that the U.S. and Iran are drifting into a “war of attrition where each side believes it can impose more pain than it can absorb. History suggests this is a recipe not for resolution, but for escalation.”
Citrinowicz argued that the U.S. needs to recognize that an all-or-nothing deal is unrealistic and that any agreement must allow Iran to “save face” while still ensuring the U.S.’s interests are addressed. “Recognizing Iran’s right to limited uranium enrichment under strict constraints is not the same as accepting a nuclear-armed Iran. In fact, it may be the only realistic path to preventing one.”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posited that the collapse of talks won’t necessarily mean a return to war. “Trump has no appetite for further armed conflict…His aim instead is to put a severely battered Iran into an economic vise to see if its leaders will set a different course in a big, comprehensive deal,” he said.
Ignatius argued that Trump aims to offer a deal with large economic benefits, while also ramping up economic pressure on Iran. The idea is to push Iranian officials to shift the country from being a revolutionary “cause” into a country that can modernize quickly and profitably, like the Gulf states.
While acknowledging that visions like these have failed repeatedly in the Middle East, Ignatius noted that “this weekend’s images from Islamabad — of an American vice president and Iranian parliamentary leader talking through the night about the shape of a possible deal — had a quality at once of both impossibility and inevitability.”
The Editorial of the National, an Emirati state-owned English newspaper, argued against a return to armed conflict, stressing that a lack of a peaceful solution “exacerbates the risk of further war, more shocks to the global energy system and uncertainty over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
“Although it is tempting for countries to respond to a diplomatic logjam with shows of strength, this desire for deterrence carries the risk of miscalculation, the consequences of which could be severe,” added the National. “It is true that, in some ways, negotiating is more difficult to prosecute than war – it is frequently slow, complex, frustrating and demanding. But when examined in contrast to the mayhem of war and the human toll it takes, there is no better way.”
A source in the Saudi royal family presented a more hawkish viewpoint in comments to Israel’s N12 news, insisting that without a ground invasion of Iran, the threat posed by the regime in the region would only worsen.
“There is no solution other than a ground military entry by the US into Iran and a repeat of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003,” the Saudi source said. “But this time we need to find a successful, acceptable and secular alternative government on the Iranian street. It would be preferable if it were not Reza Pahlavi, but rather someone who is on good terms with him, and who has broad acceptance across every segment of the street in Tehran, Isfahan, and the other provinces — and even in conservative Mashhad.”
The Saudi source stressed, however, that Saudi Arabia has no interest in joining the war at this time. “This is not our war, and if we are exposed to Iranian aggression, then each event will have its own response. But up to this moment, we have not made a decision to enter this war.”
Even before the talks in Pakistan, Jack Keane, chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, advocated for a U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to block Iranian oil sales.
Keane described the ceasefire as a “short-term win” for Iran, arguing that the U.S. and Israel were just 10 days to two weeks away from wiping out Iran’s missile program and military industries when the ceasefire began. He warned that while Iranian diplomats may be making promises to the U.S. behind closed doors, “they likely have no intention of ever agreeing to our conditions.”
“They fundamentally believe they can absorb as much damage as we can dish out, and that as long as they survive, they will eventually be able to recover and rebuild,” Keane warned. He called for the U.S. to resume strikes and take over Kharg Island, an Iranian island with critical oil facilities, if Iran continues to reject Trump’s terms after the two-week deadline passes.
“If we preserve Kharg’s infrastructure but take physical control, we’d have a chokehold over Iran’s oil and its economy. That’s the ultimate leverage we’d need to seize its ‘nuclear dust,’ or stores of enriched uranium, and to eliminate its enrichment facilities,” Keane said.
Originally Published Apr 13, 2026 11:41AM EDT
