Iran Parliament Speaker Says Ceasefire Deal Has Been Violated

The White House announced the US would hold direct talks with Iran, with Vice President JD Vance leading the US delegation, despite continued fighting in the Middle East threatening to derail the fragile ceasefire.

Iran officials said Israel's continued strikes in Lebanon violated the terms of the ceasefire, with Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stating the US must choose between ceasefire or continued war via Israel. Dr. Ed Husain, CFR Senior Fellow joins Bloomberg Businessweek Daily to discuss the future of this deal and Iran. The White House announced the US would hold direct talks with Iran even as continued fighting in the Middle East, punctuated by Israeli strikes in Lebanon, threatened to derail the fragile ceasefire in the six-week conflict.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Vice President JD Vance would lead a US delegation to Islamabad, which would include special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with the first round of talks taking place Saturday morning local time.

Sporadic fighting, however, continued throughout the region, including in Lebanon, where Israel continued its campaign against the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia. Iran officials cast that as violating the terms of the less than day-old ceasefire.

“The Iran–U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a social media post.

In a subsequent post, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf cited the fighting in Lebanon, as well as claims of a drone entering Iranian airspace and the “denial of Iran’s right to enrichment,” saying that in such circumstances, a “bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

Further underscoring the fragility of the truce, Iran kept up strikes on Gulf states and the Strait of Hormuz remained largely blocked. President Donald Trump has said that reopening the strait is a condition for halting the fighting. Leavitt reiterated Wednesday that Trump expected the strait to be “reopened immediately.”

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that passage of oil tankers through the strait were halted after Israeli strikes. Vance countered that assertion, saying “we are seeing signs that the straits are starting to reopen.”

Vance, who was traveling in Hungary told reporters “we’re on the right track” in negotiations and pushed back on Ghalibaf’s statement, saying, “I actually wonder how good he is at understanding English” because some of his comments “didn’t make sense.”

The vice president said that Israel offered to “check themselves a little bit in Lebanon” during discussions with US officials “because they want to make sure that our negotiation is successful.” The Israeli military on Wednesday said it had carried out its largest operation against Hezbollah since the start of the Iran war, targeting more than 100 of the militia’s command centers and military sites within 10 minutes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed a military campaign he said had set back the Iranian regime’s capabilities by many years but said the war had not ended.

Trump said earlier Wednesday that Lebanon was not part of the ceasefire but expressed confidence that campaign would not undercut the broader agreement. He told PBS that Hezbollah would “get taken care of, too. It’s alright.”

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