Donald Trump said a preliminary agreement to end the United States’ war with Iran has been signed by both sides as Israel vowed to keep its forces in Lebanon.
“The deal’s all signed,” Trump said on Monday after he arrived in France for a summit of the G7 group of wealthy nations, adding that his vice president JD Vance would attend a formal signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday.
The agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and extend a ceasefire for 60 days, allowing negotiations on issues such as Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions.
Nearly four months after the US and Israel launched strikes at Iran, Trump and Iranian officials had earlier said a memorandum of understanding had been agreed and the blocked Strait could open up as soon as Friday.
However, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon is not a condition of the deal being signed between Tehran and Washington, a senior White House official has said.
If Iran is unable to control Hezbollah and prevent it from launching attacks on northern Israel, the Israeli army will have the right to respond, the official said.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei previously insisted that Lebanon remained “an integral part of the agreement to end the war with the US”, adding that the agreed draft agreement called for an end to the war on all fronts.
But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country was not part of the US-Iranian agreement, said that Israel would keep its forces in southern Lebanon and would retain the right to respond to Hezbollah attacks.
“Iran wanted us to withdraw from it, but I stood firm,” he said at a news conference on Monday, where he acknowledged that he and Trump have had their differences over the conflict.
Netanyahu said he and Trump “don’t always see eye-to-eye” after the US president had earlier described his Israeli counterpart as a “very difficult guy” who should be “very thankful”.
Israeli defence minister Israel Katz had earlier said its military would remain in Lebanon “without any time limit”, putting it on a collision course with the US ahead of its sensitive talks with Iran.
And Israel’s hawkish national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir insisted on Monday that his country “must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah” or withdraw from captured territory.
One senior Israeli official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the agreement was “terrible for Israel”, an assessment they indicated was shared throughout the government from Netanyahu down.
Iran and the US, without Israel, declared an immediate end to all military operations and said they were committed to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
As Trump travelled to France on Monday for the G7 summit, in part to discuss the terms of the Iran deal, he claimed that commercial vessels carrying oil were already starting to transit the waterway.
“Ships are starting to move, many loaded up with Oil, out of the Strait of Hormuz. They are going along the Southern ‘Highway,’ which is totally safe, secure, and pristine,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
The backlog of some 500 ships still stranded in the Gulf will still likely take weeks to clear, further complicated by a mission to find and remove any Iranian mines in and around the Strait.
French president Emmanuel Macron said that France and Britain were ready to lead a mission in the Strait, with support from the Netherlands and Italy.
A Lebanese security source told state media on Monday afternoon that an Israeli drone strike on a car in south Lebanon had killed the vehicle’s driver in what would mark the first deadly Israeli attack since the announcement of the US-Iran agreement.
Hezbollah welcomed the MOU and claimed it had not carried out any operations since Sunday. But it warned Israel they would not accept any attacks violating Lebanon’s sovereignty or targeting its people.
The Swiss foreign ministry told The Independent that they were “currently in close contact with the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar to facilitate the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding in Switzerland at the end of the week”.
Once the agreement is signed, thorny issues like Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions relief will be negotiated over a 60 day period. Those issues had been in focus during talks in February, before the US and Israel attacked Iran.
