US vice-president JD Vance said he expected to hold “positive” talks with Iran as Washington and Tehran prepared for crunch negotiations in Pakistan in a bid to reach a deal to end their more than five-week war.
Two aircraft carrying Iran’s delegation led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, one of the country’s top wartime leaders, landed in Islamabad late on Friday, escorted by Pakistani fighter jets, Iranian state media said.
The delegation also included foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, a veteran nuclear negotiator, and Ali Akbar Ahmadian, secretary of the Iranian defence council.
The talks are scheduled to take place on Saturday and are aimed at building on a fragile 14-day ceasefire the US and Iran agreed this week.
But they have been undermined by disputes over whether Israel’s war with Hizbollah in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire and Iran’s refusal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a prime objective of US President Donald Trump.
After Vance’s comments, Ghalibaf had said Tehran would only participate if Israel agreed to end its assault against Hizbollah and the US agreed to unfreeze Iranian assets held overseas.
The US late on Friday oversaw a call between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington. Lebanon and Israel subsequently agreed to hold talks in Washington next week to discuss a ceasefire, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said. It would be the first direct talks between the two countries in more than four decades.
Still, Ghalibaf’s earlier warning highlighted the huge challenges facing the US-Iran talks in Islamabad, with the foes deeply distrustful of each other. Diplomats said they expected the negotiations to go ahead.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that the “Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways”.
“The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!” he added.
But Vance struck a more positive note as he departed for Pakistan, saying that if the Iranians were willing to negotiate in good faith, “we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand”. He also cautioned that “if they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive”.
Vance would be the highest-ranking US official to engage in negotiations with Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
He will be joined by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, as Washington seeks to pressure Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and agree to a deal on its nuclear programme.
Ghalibaf, a conservative close to the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps but also considered a pragmatist, will be the highest-ranking Iranian to be part of negotiations with the US in decades.
His participation underscores the importance of the talks to the Islamic regime, which believes it gained the upper hand in the more than five-week war with the US and Israel by closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking energy facilities across the Gulf, sending oil and gas prices to multiyear highs.
But Iran has also suffered devastating blows as thousands of US and Israeli air strikes pummelled the country, killing its top leaders, significantly degrading its military capabilities and hitting the heart of its industrial base. It will be desperate to secure sanctions relief as it looks to rebuild.
The two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran, announced on Tuesday, got off to a shaky start, reflecting the two countries’ different interpretations of what was agreed as the basis for talks.
There was particular confusion over an Iranian 10-point plan presented to Trump through Pakistani mediators, which the US president said was a “workable basis” for talks. However, Tehran and Washington appeared to be basing their statements on different versions of the plan.
Tensions then soared after Israel launched a massive bombing campaign against Lebanon on Wednesday as it escalated its conflict with Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group that is Iran’s most important proxy. More than 350 people were killed.
Iran said that was a violation of the ceasefire, insisting that Lebanon was supposed to be included in the truce. But the Trump administration — and Israel — said that was not the case, despite Pakistan having publicly stated it was part of the deal.
In response, Tehran said it was halting the transit of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing oil prices back over $100 a barrel and angering Trump. It has also signalled it wanted to continue charging a fee for ships transiting the waterway, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally passes.
As Israel’s attacks on Lebanon threatened to derail the truce, Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him to scale back the attacks against Hizbollah. Netanyahu said on Thursday he had authorised Israel to open talks with Lebanon.
But Israeli forces and Hizbollah continued to trade fire on Friday, although there were no strikes on Beirut. Israel hit a local government building complex in the southern city of Nabatiyeh, killing at least 11 members of the state security forces.
A diplomat briefed on the Islamabad talks said the fact that Iran had not responded militarily to Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon suggested it still wanted a deal with the US.
“This would have been an opportunity for them to break it, it was the biggest test,” they added. “But there’s a big risk that if the talks don’t work, it could go back to war. It’s a very dangerous time right now.”
As well as pressuring Iran to allow the free flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the US team was expected to push Iran to give up its capacity to enrich uranium, which Tehran rejects. The US was also expected to press Iran to agree to dilute its stockpile of 440kg of uranium enriched close to weapons grade levels.
Trump said this week that the US would work with Iran to remove all the “deeply buried” nuclear “dust” in the Islamic republic, and was discussing sanctions relief.
But Tehran also wants the US to unfreeze tens of billions of its oil money held overseas — including $6bn in Doha that the administration of Joe Biden promised to release as part of a 2023 prisoner swap deal — as Iran seeks to rebuild and manage deepening social pressures within the Islamic republic.
Tehran and Washington have never held direct bilateral negotiations — former president Hassan Rouhani held a phone call with Barack Obama after Iran sealed a nuclear accord with the US and other world powers in 2015, which Trump then abandoned in his first term.
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut
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