President Trump on Tuesday evening announced a two-week cease-fire with Iran, contingent upon the country agreeing to the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s announcement came less than 90 minutes before the 8 p.m. deadline he had imposed on Iran to reopen the strait. Earlier, the president threatened to “wipe out” an entire civilization if Iran did not open the strait by his deadline.
“This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
“Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran,” he added.
“A two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.”
The Iranian foreign minister said passage through the strait would be allowed for the next two weeks under Iranian military management. The waterway is used to transport roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump warned earlier on Tuesday, calling his 8 p.m. deadline “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
Trump set the deadline on Sunday after demanding in a social media post that Iran “Open the F***** Strait.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has been mediating talks between the U.S. and Iran, said Tuesday afternoon that he had asked Trump for a two-week extension of his deadline, and that he had asked Iranian leadership to agree to open up the strait for two weeks “as a goodwill gesture.”
“We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region,” Sharif wrote in an X post.
Iran’s Mehr News Agency on Tuesday evening published a statement from the secretariat of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme National Security Council declaring, “the American side, despite all the apparent threats, has accepted these principles as the basis for negotiations and has surrendered to the will of the Iranian people.”
“If the surrender of the enemy in the field becomes a decisive political achievement in the negotiations, we will celebrate this great historical victory together, otherwise we will fight side by side in the field until all the demands of the Iranian nation are achieved,” the statement said.
Last week, Trump delivered an address to the nation in which he called on U.S. allies to secure the strait, and further predicted that the U.S. military campaign in Iran would wind down soon.
The president said last week that the U.S. was “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly.”
“We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” he added. “We are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
He said the country’s nuclear sites have “been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust.”
“We have all the cards they have none,” he added.