U.S. Gives Iran Saturday Deadline on Strait of Hormuz

Washington handed Tehran a hard deadline Friday, warning Iran it must publicly affirm that the Strait of Hormuz is open to all commercial vessels by Saturday or face military and economic repercussions, according to senior U.S. officials.

Iranian officials had quietly told Trump administration advisers that ship attacks in the strait earlier this week were not sanctioned policy — blaming the strikes on an "errant" sect of hardliners seeking to undermine ongoing negotiations — and signaled that Tehran wished to press ahead with diplomacy, the officials said.

"They came back to the table and said, 'We screwed up. We made a mistake. Let's keep talking,'" one senior U.S. official said.

Even so, a private admission was not enough for the White House, which insisted on a public declaration. "What we're demanding is that the Iranians issue a public statement that acknowledges all channels of the Strait of Hormuz are open and they're not shooting at ships anymore," another official said. "They're either going to give us that statement, or we're not going to have a good outcome."

Diplomatic talks were scheduled to resume Saturday in Oman, after which Washington expected Iran to formally commit that the waterway would return to the same operating conditions that existed before the latest flare-up. Should Tehran decline that position, the official cautioned, "it's not going to be a great day for them."

President Trump, who earlier this week declared the ceasefire "over" and authorized two nights of airstrikes against roughly 170 Iranian targets, directed his negotiating team — led by Vice President JD Vance, Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — to continue the diplomatic effort. Trump, however, was described as giving negotiators limited time.

Reports circulated Friday that Iranian officials had privately told Trump advisers the attacks stemmed from "an 'errant' sect of hardliners who are trying to undermine negotiations" and that Tehran wanted to keep talking. Senior U.S. officials also described Iran as blaming "an 'errant' faction of hardliners seeking to undermine negotiations."

Maritime trackers spotted the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS George H.W. Bush entering the Gulf of Oman on Friday, a positioning that experts said would support a potential reinstatement of the naval blockade on Iranian ports. U.S. Central Command said more than 20 Navy warships were patrolling waters across the Middle East.

The Trump administration pushed back on Iran's rogue-hardliner explanation, maintaining instead that the ship attacks occurred because Iranian forces were caught off guard by the sheer volume of oil and gas traffic moving through the southern lane of the strait — along the Omani coast — after a memorandum of understanding signed last month reopened commercial shipping routes.

U.S. negotiators also cautioned that there was little hope of resolving the far more complicated question of Iran's nuclear program if Tehran could not honor what officials called the simplest element of any agreement: keeping the strait open to commerce.

On the fate of the remnants of Iran's nuclear program — material the president referred to as "nuclear dust" — U.S. officials said excavation would be the preferred course of action, but acknowledged that if Iran refused to behave like a "normal country," alternatives existed, among them leaving the material where it lay.

Officials would not address reports that Israeli intelligence had uncovered Iranian plots against Trump, but emphasized that the president does not make decisions out of fear or in response to threats. Trump, speaking in an interview Friday, characterized Iran's targeting of him as a long-running matter, saying, "Israel came up with nothing."

Global oil demand has contracted amid the conflict, falling to 97.9 million barrels a day in May — a year-over-year drop of 5.3 million barrels daily — the International Energy Agency reported, marking the first such annual decline since the COVID-19 pandemic.