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Iran rejects Trump’s Hormuz remarks; urges him to stop ‘indulging in delusions’
Strait will only be opened, closed under Iranian command: Deputy FM
Iran called on the US to “accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions” after President Donald Trump suggested that he would soon declare the Strait of Hormuz as a “territory of the United States.”
The crucial waterway that handled one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said in a post on X early Saturday.
“This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade,” he added.
With oil tanker traffic through the strategic strait at a trickle and peace talks between the US and Iran at an impasse, there are few signs that the war, launched by the US and Israel on Iran on February 28, is close to being over.
A 60-day negotiating period intended to hammer out a deal to end the conflict, set when Trump and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding in mid-June, ends on Monday with few direct negotiations having taken place.
Speaking Friday at a police academy in Nassau County, New York, Trump claimed Iran was being “very badly defeated,” and once victory was secured, “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”
An unnamed White House official later clarified that Trump was joking, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed in response to the unprovoked US-Israeli aggression that targeted the country from February 28 until April 7.
The US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding in June to end the cycle that had resulted from the aggression.
Tehran subsequently reopened the strait, but was forced to re-impose the closure after Washington began interfering with the legal transit mechanism that Tehran had devised for passage through the chokepoint in line with the understanding.
Earlier in August, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) conditioned reopening of the waterway to realization of such imperatives as the US’s permanently ending aggression against Iran and its regional allies, lifting its illegal naval blockade and all sanctions against the Islamic Republic, returning the country’s frozen assets, and paying compensation for the damage resulting from the aggression.
Global oil and gas markets have calmed since prices spiked at the start of the war, but prices are still significantly higher than before the conflict, and rose again early Friday.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains a trickle of the 130-140 vessels that typically traverse it during peacetime. Only two vessels passed through the strait on Friday, with no crude oil shipments visible, according to analysis from ship-tracking firm Kpler.