April 23 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump said there was no deadline for the extension to the cease-fire with Iran, no time pressure to end the war and that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports was doing its job.
Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday night, Trump said there was “no time pressure on this cease-fire extension” and dismissed reports of a 3 to 5-day window before the United States would resume military action as untrue, adding that he was “not in a rush” and wanted the best deal.
Trump said the U.S. military blockade “scares the Iranians more than the bombing.”
Saying that Trump had extended the cease-fire due to the fractured Iranian regime’s inability to present a unified position in negotiations, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed talks “are ongoing” and that Trump had made his red lines very clear.
“Iran can never obtain a nuclear bomb with which to threaten the United States and our allies and they must turn over the enriched uranium that’s in their possession,” said Leavitt who acknowledged that the uranium was buried deep beneath the ground after the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear sites in June.
“It’s important to the president that they hand over that enriched uranium. He’s made that quite clear to them and now we’re waiting to hear back from the Iranian regime. The fact they cannot send a unified message yet, which is why the president decided to extend the cease-fire, shows just how successful Operation Epic Fury truly was,” she added.
“There’s a lot of internal division over there, the president understands that, and so we await their response.”
The comments out of the administration came amid an apparent stalemate with both sides enforcing respective maritime blockades that continue to paralyse commercial shipping through the key Hormuz Strait, while showing no sign of dispatching delegations to negotiations Pakistan is attempting to broker anytime soon.
Speaking after Iran’s military attacked and seized two container ships, and fired on a third, early Wednesday, Iranian chief negotiator Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said reopening the strait was impossible amid “flagrant” breaches of the cease-fire and “bullying” by the United States.
“A cease-fire only makes sense if it is not violated by the maritime blockade and the hostage-taking of the world’s economy, and if the Zionist warmongering across all fronts is halted,” Ghalibaf wrote in a post on X.
His deputy, Hamidreza Haji Babaei, deputy speaker of parliament, claimed Thursday that funds from tolls paid by ships to transit the strait had been deposited into the account of the country’s central bank for the first time.
The state-run Tasnim News Agency did not provide details about how the tolls were collected, the amount, or who paid them.
Back in March, a figure of $2 million per passage that was circulating was denied by the Iranian embassy in India.
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