- Trump Says Talks Continue; Tehran says no progress has been made.
- Israel and Lebanon agree to implement ceasefire.
- Kuwait says 63 injured in attack, airport damaged.
US President Donald Trump has said that the Iran negotiations could produce a result “over the weekend”.
“I’m hearing that the negotiations themselves are actually going very well,” Trump said of a potential deal. “It could happen … over the weekend,” he told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
Trump also said he wants to separate talks on the conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah from those on the US-Iran war, although Tehran insists the two are linked.
“I want to separate it, I want a separate thing because it is, it’s separate,” he said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium were at the center of discussions with Tehran and expressed hope that the latest round of talks in Washington between Israel and Lebanon will produce a security roadmap.
Washington insists Tehran must hand over its near-weapons-grade enriched uranium, agree to curb its nuclear activities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the main shipping channel for oil and gas from the Gulf, for any peace deal to take hold.
In contrast to the upbeat US remarks, Iran’s foreign minister struck a downbeat tone, saying no tangible progress has been made in talks to end the war in the Middle East as fresh US and Iranian attacks strained a fragile ceasefire.
Kuwaiti officials said the renewed hostilities included an Iranian drone attack on a passenger terminal at Kuwait’s international airport that killed one person and wounded 63.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said lines of communication with the United States remained open, but warned that any Israeli attack on the Lebanese capital Beirut as part of its campaign against Hezbollah would trigger a “full-scale resumption” of the conflict.
“Communications with the Americans have not been interrupted and messages have been exchanged about the need to stop aggression against Beirut, but no tangible progress has been made in the negotiation process,” Tasnim the news agency quoted Araghchi as telling Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV.
“Any attack on Beirut will have serious consequences and will lead to a full-scale resumption of war,” he said. “Our armed forces are ready to attack Israel if it attacks Beirut.”
‘Playing with fire’
Kuwait’s military condemned the drone attack on the airport as an act of “criminal Iranian aggression”. India’s Ministry of External Affairs said the one fatality was an Indian national.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard denied attacking the airport, saying it was “a failure of the US Patriot systems, which landed at the terminal after failing to intercept Iranian missiles.” The Revolutionary Guards also accused US forces of provoking a response by attacking a tanker and a communications tower on the country’s Qeshm Island.
The new attacks represent one of the more serious tests yet of the April 8 ceasefire that paused more than a month of war triggered by the US-Israeli bombing of Iran and has largely held despite sporadic exchanges of fire.
Trump played down the renewed hostilities by saying “in that part of the world, there is a ceasefire when you shoot in a more moderate way.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, accused Iran of “playing with fire”.
“Iran certainly knows what the (US) president has said, that if necessary, there will be a full-scale return to military action,” Netanyahu said in an interview with the US channel. CNBC.
Kuwait suspended air traffic and diverted arriving flights to other destinations after the drone attack on the airport, but later restarted Kuwait Airways flights.
The international airport has been attacked several times during the war, and was only fully reopened on Monday.
Hassan Sheikh, a 40-year-old Pakistani resident of Kuwait who lives near the airport, said he heard explosions throughout the night, adding: “For the first time, my children felt how serious the situation was.”
