President Trump called off what he described as the largest planned U.S. military operation since World War II, announcing Saturday that strikes on Iran were canceled on condition of a rapid deal. In a Saturday night Truth Social post, Trump wrote that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” against Iran at levels of military power not seen since World War II, but that Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to hold off because the “perimeters” of a deal had been agreed. He said the framework included the immediate, complete, and total opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to what he called Iran’s nuclear threat, and that Israel had joined the commitment to refrain from attacking. According to U.S. officials cited in American press reports, the Navy had already adjusted its air operations for the planned day of strikes and prepared munitions for the attack.
The reversal followed direct appeals from Gulf capitals, chiefly Riyadh. Axios reporter Barak Ravid, citing two U.S. officials and a source familiar with the call, reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman raised concerns about the planned strikes in a Saturday phone call with Trump, asked for details of the operational plan and urged him to de-escalate. President Trump had been seriously weighing strikes on Iran’s energy facilities, with reports of an imminent escalation leaking over the weekend. Saudi Arabia’s state news agency SPA confirmed the call, saying the crown prince stressed prioritizing dialogue to reduce escalation and achieving calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions.
Axios added that Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, and Pakistan were also working to lower tensions, and that Qatari mediators spoke separately Saturday with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, and Omani officials about a Hormuz reopening deal. Israel’s Channel 12, citing senior U.S. officials, reported that CENTCOM had prepared strikes on Iranian energy and infrastructure targets with Israeli participation expected, that Qatar asked Trump for another 24 hours, and that negotiators were close to an arrangement including a renewed ceasefire, a toll-free opening of the strait for 60 days, new shipping routes, and resumed U.S.-Iran talks based on the June 17 memorandum of understanding. Neither government has confirmed these reported terms.
On Sunday, Trump said negotiations with Iran would begin Monday afternoon and repeatedly called a deal imminent. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he said the U.S. had been prepared to launch the attack Sunday before Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Iran urged him to hold off, saying “we were all set to go” and that it would have been a massive attack. “The deal is imminent, having to do with the Hormuz Strait and also, ultimately, the denuclearization of Iran,” he said. Asked about resuming strikes, he said the U.S. was ready to go at any time but that he was not looking to kill people, and that Gulf leaders preferred a deal to a refugee crisis spilling across their borders. Oil markets moved on the announcement: Brent crude fell $4.08, or about 4.6 percent, to $83.85 a barrel late Sunday, with WTI down $4.01 at $80.66, per Reuters.
Iranian outlets denied nearly every element of the American account. The semi-official Mehr news agency rejected Trump’s claim that Tehran had asked the U.S. to refrain from attacking, and Iranian semi-official media denied reports that Iran had agreed to a deal dividing control of the Strait of Hormuz. The state news agency IRNA reported that Araghchi spent Saturday on the phone with senior officials in Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia - including Field Marshal Asim Munir and Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan - warning against any adventurous action by the U.S. military and emphasizing Iran’s full readiness to safeguard its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security.
On Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told his weekly press conference in Tehran that no negotiations between Iran and the United States are under way: “We are not going to host a delegation or be guests of a country during these days.” However, the denial does not appear to extend to indirect talks through mediators, which appear to be ongoing.
Trump answered Iran’s denial Monday morning with a post accusing Iran’s leadership of lying about the nature of negotiations. “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” he wrote on Truth Social, saying Tehran asked for meetings - “some would say ‘beg’” - with talks beginning and more scheduled. He dismissed Iran’s statements that it would operate the strait powerfully, claiming that the waterway is already completely controlled by the U.S. Navy and its blockade, which he called “The United States Wall of Steel,” and that nothing would get through to Iran unless a deal or total surrender was accomplished, ending with the declaration that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a Fox News interview, said “regime change” in Iran need not mean full overthrow but a change in the regime’s nature and behavior, achieved by imposing costs it can no longer pay. He added that unlike a nuclear agreement, which can be signed and verified, forcing a government to abandon its regional strategy is a continuing process, and pressure toward it would have no defined endpoint.
The negotiation that does exist, by Tehran’s account, is between Iran and Oman, over a new transit corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Araghchi told Monday’s cabinet session, per Iranian state media, that the talks are on a path to being finalized and are in their final stages. Baghaei said the discussions, running for the past seven to eight days, aim to agree on a specific corridor for transit between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman. He indicated the route would be temporary and meant to provide safe navigation “in consultation and cooperation with Oman.” He said the agreed path would be neither the current northern route nor the existing Oman-approved southern route, which he said had made the region insecure and harmed Iran’s national interests, but a new route both sides settle on.
Araghchi asserted that the strait was closed by American treaty violations and the U.S. blockade, not by any dispute with Muscat, and that an Iran-Oman understanding is therefore a necessary but not sufficient condition for reopening the waterway. Israel’s Channel 12, citing two informed diplomats, reported the corridor under discussion would have ships enter the strait from the Iranian-controlled side and exit on the Omani side, and that Araghchi’s reported assent to a reopening deal was what prompted Trump’s decision to cancel the attack. Al Mayadeen, the Lebanese network close to Iran, cited an unnamed Iranian source said Washington had offered concessions on the southern route, which Tehran rejected while telling the U.S. the strait would not open until the war fully ends. None of these accounts has been independently verified.
Mediation channels multiplied through the weekend. Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar invited Araghchi to visit Islamabad at the earliest opportunity in a Monday phone call, according to a Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement that said the two discussed regional and international developments. Araghchi is currently in Najaf, Iraq, and Pakistan has been the principal mediator between Tehran and Washington.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, posted on X that the Islamabad MoU was the product of the collective wisdom of the Supreme National Security Council, that all its members are aligned behind it, and that the agreement “will be the center of gravity of our foreign relations” going forward, adding that the security of Iran, the region, and Iran’s allies would be enhanced by it. The statement serves as a call to compel American adherence to the framework rather than abandon it.
Hardline institutions in Tehran warned against the diplomatic track in unusually severe terms. The presidium of the Assembly of Experts issued a statement, carried by Iranian media, cautioning against any simplistic thinking at this sensitive juncture, saying the recent attacks and repeated violations of the MoU proved the American president’s signature invalid and that trust in this government is nothing but a mirage. The statement declared that whispers of capitulation by plotters acting in the name of defending peace constitute an unforgivable treason, that confronting such actions legally is the clear duty of relevant officials, and that all steps must remain within the views, directives, and judgments of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The same presidium declared Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “mahdoor al-dam” - deserving of death - in early July, a statement the Assembly’s own secretariat described the next day as unusual and unconventional and in need of further review.
Acting Defense Minister Majid Ebn-Reza wrote on X that even if the enemy’s recent statements are made as psychological operations and a war of calculations, Iran regards every threat as a real and serious one, and would be neither surprised nor passive, treating threats as grounds to raise readiness and strengthen deterrence.
Military signaling continued through the pause on both sides. The IRGC announced, in a statement carried by the Tasnim news agency, that it had shot down a U.S. MQ-9 drone over the Strait of Hormuz with fire from a new advanced Aerospace Force air-defense system; the statement gave no date or time, and CENTCOM has neither confirmed nor denied the claim. On Sunday, the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency reported that a tanker’s master heard an explosion in close proximity to the vessel 20 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman; the ship and crew were safe and authorities were investigating.
Separately, CNN reported that an officer in CENTCOM’s intelligence branch emailed a broad group of military analysts last Wednesday soliciting “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an approach military officials described as unusual. However, Capt. Timothy Hawkins responded that the command has a long history of innovative thinking and that Adm. Brad Cooper seeks input from personnel regardless of rank. The same reporting said U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded the bombing campaign alone is unlikely to change Iran’s negotiating position, and that CENTCOM has developed - though Trump has not approved - a plan for one to two weeks of heavy bombardment aimed at Iran’s remaining missile capabilities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted Monday that the U.S. remains “locked and loaded” and ready to strike at levels not seen since World War II.
An adviser to Iran’s army command disclosed ground campaigns inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Brig. Gen. Mojtaba Jafari, adviser to the commander-in-chief of the regular army, said at a ceremony Monday, in remarks carried by Iranian media, that commandos of the 23rd NOHED Brigade - the Army Ground Force’s airborne special forces - have carried out 14 ground operations in Sulaymaniyah and Erbil against what he called counter-revolutionaries, destroying and capturing their personnel and returning without losses. Al Mayadeen reported that the operations included the killing of Soran Mohammadzadeh, whom it described as an intelligence commander in the Kurdish opposition, along with strikes on intelligence figures of separatist groups and several Iraqis.
The Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) said in a July 3 statement that Mohammadzadeh, a member of its general organization, was assassinated in an Erbil hotel on the evening of June 26 by a team of IRGC intelligence operatives using local collaborators, that he was buried a week later, and that the party withheld details at the time to deny the Islamic Republic an intelligence advantage. These accounts come from parties to the conflict and have not been independently confirmed, but they point to a ground dimension of the war inside Iraqi Kurdistan larger than previously acknowledged.
Shipping data showed traffic through the strait still falling as negotiations have continued. Maritime tracker Kpler recorded 51 vessel transits through Hormuz from July 30 to August 2, down about 28 percent from 71 in the preceding four days. Most of the vessels - 30 were headed toward Iran, and a substantial share involved sanctioned tonnage, including 10 ships under U.S. sanctions and 10 counted in the Russia-Iran “shadow fleet.” AIS data from MarineTraffic and LSEG showed six Saudi-flagged supertankers, returning empty from Asian destinations, diverting toward southern Africa rather than transiting the Bab al-Mandeb Strait after Houthi threats against Saudi shipping.
The maritime intelligence firm Windward reported an apparent Chinese exception at both chokepoints: 22 China-linked vessels passed Bab al-Mandeb and berthed at Saudi ports between July 20 and August 2 without a single incident, even as the Houthis attacked four Saudi tankers in the same window, while a Hong Kong-flagged very large crude carrier exited Hormuz on July 30-31 broadcasting “Chinese crew/owner” in its AIS destination field, having loaded roughly 2.14 million barrels at Iraq’s Basra terminal for Singapore. CENTCOM, for its part, said it has redirected 35 commercial vessels and disabled two others since restarting its blockade of Iranian ports - figures that, like the IRGC’s tanker-strike claims, come from a party to the conflict.
The weekend’s sequence follows a pattern the war has produced before. A threatened escalation, a pause announced from Washington, contested claims about what was agreed, and then recriminations within a day. The June 17 MoU and the early-July truce each traveled a similar arc before collapsing within weeks. The likely near-term outcome, if the Oman channel holds, is a narrow and explicitly temporary transit corridor rather than a settlement. Baghaei’s own framing sets that ceiling: even a finalized Iran-Oman understanding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reopening the strait, with the broader questions on the blockade, the nuclear file and the collapsed MoU potentially deferred to talks that Tehran currently denies are happening. Whether Monday’s exchange of accusations derails the corridor talks themselves should be clearer within days.
The cost of another failed off-ramp would fall, as before, on people with no say in it. The crews navigating two contested straits, the families in southern Iran’s coastal cities who have absorbed the heaviest recent strikes, and the millions already displaced are living with decisions made in Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf capitals. By OCHA and UNHCR counts from the war’s first phase alone, as many as 2,362 civilians were killed and 3.2 million people displaced. Similarly, 18 U.S. service members have been killed in action since February with many hundreds more injured. A corridor through the Strait of Hormuz may not end the war, but it would be a key step away from it that could build toward greater progress.