CAIRO\/DUBAI
\nQatar\u2019s prime minister visited Tehran on Thursday in a bid to relaunch diplomacy after the US and Iran traded recriminations over Washington\u2019s promise to increase economic pressure, a move one Iranian official described as \u201call-out economic war.\u201d
\nA Gulf neighbor of Iran and a US ally, Qatar has served as a back-channel negotiator for the warring parties and played a direct role in securing a June ceasefire that briefly led to a cessation of hostilities.
\nQatar\u2019s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who is also his country\u2019s foreign minister, met Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to Iran\u2019s foreign ministry channel on Telegram.
\nThe visit comes as the war nears its sixth month with fighting largely paused but no diplomatic breakthrough in sight. Both sides are at odds over control of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for global oil supplies that Tehran has used as leverage.
\nA memorandum of understanding reached between the US and Iran in June to end the \u200cconflict broke down in \u200cpart because of differences over the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman where one-fifth of the \u200cworld\u2019s oil supplies passed before the war began on February 28.
\nQatar and Iran discussed a proposed phased framework that includes establishing a temporary joint Iranian-Omani shipping corridor through the strait and carrying out a joint project to clear mines from the waterway, Qatar\u2019s foreign ministry said. The two officials also reviewed the latest developments in the region and efforts to de-escalate tensions and create conditions for dialogue, the ministry said.
\nAlthough the strikes have stopped, Washington is now piling on economic pressure by announcing plans to cut Iran off from its trading partners with increased sanctions. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf on Thursday called for national unity in the face of what he described as \u201call-out economic war,\u201d warning that internal division was \u201cexactly what the enemy wants.\u201d
\nEbrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament\u2019s national security committee, said the sanctions were an \u201cinhumane and hostile act\u201d \u200cwhich nonetheless had lost their effectiveness. Tehran has lived under various forms of US sanctions \u200csince the Islamic revolution in 1979. Hormuz oil flows have fallen to a three-month low, with just 5 million barrels per day transiting on Monday, according \u200cto the latest ship-tracking data.
\nBefore the war, the strait carried roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude oil. Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards said on Wednesday that Iran and Oman had agreed on how to share the waterway and its revenues, but a senior Iranian source later said the two countries were still working on the details of an agreement.
\nThe International Maritime Organization has reported 70 incidents in the Strait of Hormuz since February 28 that have killed 19 seafarers.<\/p>\n
Despite an aerial bombardment earlier in the war that severely diminished Iran\u2019s conventional forces, Tehran \u200chas maintained enough missile and drone capability to attack Gulf neighbors that house US military bases and disrupt oil tankers in the strait.<\/p>\n
Thousands of others have died, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, since the US and Israel attacked Iran with the stated goals of denying Iran a nuclear weapon, helping Iranians topple their government, and destroying Tehran\u2019s missile program. An unidentified projectile hit a tanker in the strait on Tuesday to set off a fire that was later doused, but all crew were safe and accounted for, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said.
\nThe Strait of Hormuz was open to free navigation before the war, but Iran has since clung to its control of the waterway as leverage and a revenue source, seeking to charge ships a commission, which the US has opposed. \u201cAn agreement with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz has not been finalized,\u201d the senior Iranian source told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that talks on its details were continuing.
\nThat seemed to contradict a statement by Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who said Iran and Oman had \u201creached results that are acceptable to both sides\u201d on controlling the strait and its revenues.
\nMohebbi said the strait would remain shut unless the US met Tehran\u2019s conditions under the interim ceasefire that the two sides signed in June before it unraveled. Those conditions include an end to the US blockade on Iranian ports, compensation and removal of sanctions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CAIRO\/DUBAI Qatar\u2019s prime minister visited Tehran on Thursday in a bid to relaunch diplomacy after the US and Iran traded recriminations over Washington\u2019s promise to increase economic pressure, a move one Iranian official described as \u201call-out economic war.\u201d A Gulf neighbor of Iran and a US ally, Qatar has served as a back-channel negotiator for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102222,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102249,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102237\/revisions\/102249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}