U.S. President Donald Trump described Iran’s latest peace proposal as “trash” this Monday and warned that the current ceasefire is hanging “by a thread,” while he weighs the resumption of military operations in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Right now, the ceasefire is still in effect, but it is incredibly fragile, I would say. The most fragile it has ever been. And I say this after reading the trash they sent us. I haven’t even finished reading it yet,” the leader told reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, referring to Tehran’s latest submission.
The American leader stated that reading the Iranian text felt like a “waste of time” and, therefore, considered the ceasefire in effect since April 8 to be on “life support,” comparing it to a doctor saying, “your loved one has exactly a 1% chance of surviving.”
Earlier, during a telephone interview with Fox News, Donald Trump said he was considering relaunching “Operation Project Freedom,” which aims to provide protection to hundreds of commercial vessels stranded by the Iranian blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, and which was briefly implemented last week.
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“They want to negotiate and they present us with a stupid proposal, a stupid proposal, and nobody would accept it. Only Obama [former U.S. president] would have accepted it,” he said, alluding to his Democratic predecessor.
The Republican politician insisted that his administration has “a plan,” which consists of ensuring that the Islamic Republic never obtains a nuclear weapon, and criticized the fact that this commitment was absent from Tehran’s response.
However, in response to questions from the press at the White House, Trump admitted that a diplomatic solution remains “very possible” despite the negotiating impasse.
“We will have a complete victory. We have already had, in theory, a complete victory from a military standpoint,” he declared.
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The truce in the war, initiated by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28, is at its most critical point after Trump himself considered Tehran’s response to Washington’s peace proposal “completely unacceptable” on Sunday.
Pakistan, the mediating country in the negotiations, confirmed it had received the Iranian response to the latest U.S. proposal amidst an escalation of hostilities from Tehran, which included a drone attack on a commercial ship in Qatari waters on Sunday.
