Iranian state media reported later Wednesday that Tehran will soon close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for the global transit of oil, in response to Israel’s Lebanon strikes.
The developments underscore the fragility of the temporary peace agreement Trump announced on Tuesday, as Iran insists Lebanon be included in the framework and both the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argue it remains fair game for Israel Defense Forces attacks.
“The Iran–U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel,” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said in a statement on X. “It cannot have both. The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refuted reports of the strait’s closure in a briefing, telling reporters that they don’t square with the private conversations administration officials are having with Iranian interlocutors.
“The president was made aware of those reports before I came to the podium,” she said. “That is completely unacceptable, and again, this is a case of what they’re saying publicly is different privately. We have seen an uptick of traffic in the Strait today.”
But ceasefires, Leavitt said, “are fragile by nature.”
“We’ve seen this with respect to the 12-day war with Iran and Israel last year,” she told reporters. “It takes time sometimes for these ceasefires to be fully effectuated.”
Trump announced the eleventh-hour temporary peace agreement, as the world waited to see if he’d follow through on a threat to invoke civilizational destruction if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz before an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline.
Araghchi said his country would end its operations “if attacks against Iran are halted” and promised “safe passage through” the critical waterway “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces” in a statement released shortly after Trump’s announcement.
But the UAE’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its air defenses “engaged” 17 ballistic missiles and 35 UAVs “launched from Iran.” Kuwait’s Defense Ministry said that its air defenses had spent the morning responding to Iranian attacks. And Bahrain’s Interior Ministry wrote on X that it put out a fire in a facility targeted by Iran on Wednesday.
Sharif is placing the weight of peace on both sides of the conflict. In his social media post, he tagged the accounts of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Araghchi, among other high-profile figures leading diplomatic overtures.
The White House also announced Wednesday that the vice president would lead a delegation to Pakistan along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to negotiate a permanent end to the war.