Iran’s foreign minister said that new negotiations with the United States would start immediately after their preliminary deal is signed on Friday. President Trump said he hoped the conflict would soon be in the “rearview mirror.” Share full articleImageA billboard featuring Iran’s first two supreme leaders in Tehran, on Monday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google Latest PinnedUpdated June 16, 2026, 10:07 a.m. ETLeo SandsFrancesca Regalado and John Yoon Here’s the latest.The United States and Iran on Tuesday appeared to signal they were willing to engage constructively during the next round of talks, days after agreeing to a preliminary deal to cease hostilities for 60 days and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In remarks at the Group of 7 summit in France, President Trump said he hoped the conflict would soon be in the “rear viewmirror” and praised Iran’s recently-installed government. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational,” he said. At the same time, some Iranian officials indicated they were ready to start negotiations toward ending the war. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the talks would begin on Friday, when the preliminary deal is scheduled to come into effect. And Mohammad Reza Aref, the first vice president, sought to manage domestic criticism of the agreement. The text of the initial deal has not been publicly released and the thorniest differences between the two sides, including the future of Iran’s nuclear program, have been deferred to the next round of talks. Iran and the United States have continued to use escalatory rhetoric to convey their maximalist demands, suggesting those discussions could be difficult. Mr. Trump threatened “all hell” if Iran still sought to develop a nuclear weapon, a day after Iranian officials suggested they could charge fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Araghchi said that under the terms of the initial deal, Iran expected Israeli forces to immediately withdraw from Lebanon and halt their attacks in the country. But Israel has said its military would remain in Lebanon, where its forces have been targeting the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, and it has continued to launch strikes since the U.S.-Iran preliminary deal was announced over the weekend. Mr. Trump urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to “be more responsible with respect to Lebanon,” and suggested that Syria would be more effective at dealing with the threat from Hezbollah. Over the weekend, President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria dismissed any suggestion that his country would intervene. Mr. Trump has said that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen starting Friday. But shipping companies have responded cautiously to the preliminary agreement, and traffic through the waterway, a crucial transit route for oil and gas supplies, was minimal on Tuesday. Some companies have warned that they would need more details and security guarantees before resuming operations there. G7 summit: At the meeting on the south shore of Lake Geneva, the focus was on Ukraine and the Middle East as Mr. Trump sought help to demine the Strait of Hormuz. Follow live › European Union leaders chatted with Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Évian, France, on Tuesday and discussed the situation in the Middle East. As Europeans debate what they can do to help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a French and British-led international coalition has become the focus. The strait is likely to remain a big topic of discussion later this week, when E.U. leaders meet in Brussels for a summit on Thursday and Friday. A senior Iranian official called for unity on Tuesday as the government sought to manage domestic criticism of its preliminary agreement with the United States. Mohammad Reza Aref, a senior vice president, said that differences over the negotiations should not turn into “internal disputes,” according to the Iranian Student News Agency, a semiofficial news agency. He added that he hoped the memorandum of understanding would lead to a formal agreement and called on Iranians to respect the outcome of the talks. The remarks suggested that Iranian officials were trying to contain hard-line opposition to the deal while presenting the diplomacy as the result of Iran’s strength during the war. President Trump again said he would release the text of the framework agreement with Iran “in the next couple of days,” but did not specify further. Members of Congress were among the many officials who have asked to see the text of the agreement. “I’ll not only release it, I’ll probably have a press conference and read it to you word by word so that the press covers it accurately,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with the president of the United Arab Emirates. Shipping companies remain cautious about the Strait of Hormuz.ImageA mural in Tehran in April depicting the Strait of Hormuz.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York TimesThere was little indication on Tuesday that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz had resumed, even after President Trump urged companies to restart the flow of oil through the waterway after announcing a preliminary deal with Iran that aims to eventually end the war. Three global shipping companies with vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf told The New York Times on Tuesday that their ships had not resumed crossing the Strait of Hormuz as they continued to evaluate the risk of doing so. Kpler, a ship-tracking company, has said that about 500 large commercial vessels remain in the gulf. A Japanese company, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, said that its operations in the strait would not restart “until safety has been sufficiently confirmed.” The company said in a statement that it “will require close coordination with the governments of the relevant countries, insurers and other stakeholders” to resume shipping through the waterway. Hapag-Lloyd, a German company, said that it was reviewing available information and re-evaluating whether it was safe for its vessels to pass through the strait. But, in a statement, the company also struck an optimistic tone: “The latest developments give reason to hope that the security situation in the Strait of Hormuz will improve.” In a statement on Tuesday, Maersk of Denmark called the peace agreement a “welcome positive development” but added that it had not changed its operation in the region because publicly available details about the reopening of the strait were still limited. After the preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran was announced on Sunday, Mr. Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz partially open. “Ships are starting to go out now and Friday it will be completely opened,” Mr. Trump said on Monday in a bilateral meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France, referring to the signing of the deal scheduled to take place on Friday in Geneva. Mr. Trump also wrote on social media on Monday that there was a “totally safe, secure, and pristine” pathway for ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center, a British naval agency, said in an advisory note on Monday that the security threat in the strait remained “severe.” The agency also said that the U.S. military’s naval blockade of Iranian ports remained in effect, warning ships not to attempt to go in or out of Iranian ports “until direction is given.” Throughout the monthslong war, Iran has launched sporadic attacks on ships, effectively blocking the strait, which typically carried a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its gas before the conflict began. The United States has also blocked ships from leaving or entering Iran’s ports in retaliation for Iran’s hold on the strait. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that the American naval presence around the strait guaranteed safe passage, but that has not led to a meaningful increase in shipping traffic. Experts have said that it could take months for global shipping traffic and energy flows to return to prewar levels. President Trump renewed his criticism of Israel’s war strategy against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group in Lebanon. “Too many people are being killed,” he said during a meeting with the emir of Qatar. “And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.” President Trump said on Tuesday at the G7 summit in France that he had suggested to Israel that it “let Syria take care of Hezbollah,” adding that “they’d do a better job.” In an interview with NBC last week, he called for a more “surgical” campaign against the Iran-backed group and said Syria could be involved. Syria’s new government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has pursued smuggling networks tied to Hezbollah inside the country, but has given no indication that it intends to carry out military operations in neighboring Lebanon. Any role across the border would be politically explosive and almost certainly be opposed by the Lebanese government, reviving memories of Syria’s nearly three-decade occupation of the country. President Trump said that if Iran continued to develop a nuclear weapon then “all hell will rain down on them,” the latest in a number of grandiose statements since his administration reached a framework agreement with Iran to pause the war. The memorandum of understanding, which has not yet been released, leaves the issue of Iran’s nuclear capability unresolved for at least another 60 days, when both sides are expected to negotiate on the issue. President Trump called the preliminary agreement with Iran a “fair” and “good” deal at the G7 Summits in Evian-les-Bains, France, during a meeting with the emir of Qatar. “The biggest thing is they will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “That’s the reason I got in, and that’s the reason I agreed to sign.” Both the United States and Iran have indicated that the nuclear program is not addressed in the preliminary framework, and will be negotiated as part of a longer-term deal. Israel carried out new strikes in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency, though the pace and intensity of attacks have dropped since the United States and Iran said they had signed a preliminary deal that could ultimately end the war on Sunday. The text of the agreement has not been publicly released, but Iranian officials have consistently insisted that it includes an end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But Israel, which is not a party to the agreement, has said it would continue to target Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, and occupy a swath of territory it has seized in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah said overnight that it had attacked Israeli troops southeast of Nabatieh, a major southern city that Israeli ground forces have advanced toward in recent days. Oil prices fall as traders assess the U.S.-Iran deal.Oil prices fell further on Tuesday, extending declines spurred by the United States and Iran’s announcing on Sunday that they had reached a preliminary agreement to end the war. Stocks were mixed after rising in recent days. Despite the drop in oil prices, they are still more than 10 percent higher since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran starting in late February. Hundreds of ships remain stranded in the Persian Gulf unable to transport oil and gas to global markets.
Original Source: NYTimes
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