Senior US envoys arrived in Doha for talks with Qatari mediators, opening a fresh diplomatic push as Washington dispatches a negotiating team to the Gulf at a moment of sharp regional strain.
“Mr Steve Witkoff and Mr Jared Kushner are here in Doha to meet with mediators, with Qatari officials, and the talks will be around all regional issues,” foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said.
Mr Ansari said the agenda would cover Iran as well as other files, including Lebanon, reflecting the wide reach of the current crisis.
“They are not here for their negotiations with the Iranians,” he added.
He also moved to dampen expectations of a breakthrough involving direct contact between واشنطن and Tehran in the Qatari capital.
“To the best of my knowledge, there are no direct meetings scheduled between the two parties in the coming days,” he said.
He said an Iranian “technical delegation travels to and from Doha based on the progress of negotiations. There is currently no high-level delegation present”.
The so-called technical talks, involving lower-ranking officials working through the details, included “tracks on the nuclear side… a track on the economic and state performance issue” as well as security, the spokesman said.
Qatar had earlier declined to mediate while under Iranian fire, after Tehran launched an unprecedented aerial bombardment against Gulf states in retaliation for the US-Israeli strikes.
But in recent weeks, the Gulf emirate has stepped back into a central role in diplomacy after Pakistan brokered an initial ceasefire in April.
Iran dismisses reports of Doha negotiations
A senior Iranian official said any meeting in Doha would be confined to efforts to manage the Strait of Hormuz and lower tensions.
Even so, oil prices extended their decline as the weekend de-escalation eased market nerves, putting them on course for their steepest quarterly drop since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Iran moves to tighten its grip on the strait
Four months after the war began, shipping through the strait — once a conduit for about a fifth of global trade in oil and liquefied natural gas — had slowed to a near standstill.
Iran has since tried to assert control over the waterway alongside Oman, which sits opposite the strait, saying it intends to charge ships fees for passage and impeding vessels that drift beyond designated routes.
Since Thursday, the US has accused Iran of striking at least two commercial ships with missiles or drones, and has bombed Iranian military facilities in retaliation.
Iran responded on Sunday by firing missiles and drones at US military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain, with each side accusing the other of violating the ceasefire.
The conflict has fuelled global inflation and intensified political pressure on Mr Trump at home ahead of November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of the US Congress.
Yesterday, the White House said Mr Trump had authorised a temporary suspension of some duties on imports of phosphate fertiliser from Morocco, as US farmers face shortages and fertiliser shipments through the Strait of Hormuz are expected to recover to pre-conflict levels only slowly.
“The meeting in Doha is going to be perhaps important, perhaps not,” Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to find out.”
Inside Iran, where the theocratic leadership emerged from the war intact but under mounting public anger over a damaged economy, two members of the Revolutionary Guards were killed in what the elite force called a “terrorist” shooting in a western province.
The interim deal between the US and Iran also provides for an end to the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But Lebanon’s influential parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally, cast doubt on a separate US-brokered framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel aimed at ending that war.
Analysts said the arrangement could harden a stalemate by linking Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon to Hezbollah’s disarmament.
