• Trump ‘may or may not’ be at formal signing ceremony; Vance, Kushner and Witkoff expected to attend
• US president claims strait open for ships; military says its blockade remains in place for now
• Ghalibaf congratulates compatriots
• Netanyahu claims Israel ‘saved from N-war’
• Officials say Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon ‘not part of deal’
• Experts see ‘pyrrhic victory’ for Washington

TEHRAN / WASHINGTON: The US and Iran have ‘electronically’ signed an agreement to end the war in the Middle East, President Donald Trump said on Monday, although the pact may yet hinge on events in Lebanon, and defers tricky talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme until later.

“The deal’s all signed,” Trump said after he arrived in France for a summit of the G7 group of big economies.

The announcement marked the culmination of hectic efforts by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Qatar — among other players — to seal a deal between Tehran and Washington, which has been imperiled by Israeli belligerence in Lebanon.

A formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will be signed in Geneva on Friday by US Vice President J.D. Vance. “I may be involved, I may not, but JD was coming in for that specifically,” Trump told reporters.

In addition, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are also expected to be at the signing, US officials said.

VP Vance said Iran’s foreign minister and parliament speaker will represent Iran at the signing in Switzerland on Friday and many details of the deal are still to be sorted out.

The agreement would reopen the blockaded Strait of Hormuz and extend a ceasefire for 60 days, allowing negotiators to tackle difficult issues like the future of Iran’s nuclear programme.

The deal is the most significant step yet to resolve the conflict, which has killed at least 7,000 people, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, and upended global energy markets. But much about the agreement remains unknown.

Trump, who had earlier said the blockaded Strait of Hormuz would be open on Friday, said on Monday that ships had already begun transiting it. However, the US military told shippers it had not yet lifted its blockade of Iranian ports.

On Monday, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — who was also part of Tehran’s negotiating team — congratulated his compatriots over the signing of the deal, saying: “Iran has taken a great stride toward final victory”.

While the text of the deal has not yet been released, VP Vance told CNBC he expected it to become public sometime this week.

“You know that there are a lot of very important details to figure out that we’re actually going to sit at the table [for technical negotiations] and discuss together and figure out a path forward,” he said.

The deal reportedly provides for a 60-day cessation of hostilities during which the two sides will negotiate a permanent settlement, including disputes over the country’s enriched uranium stockpile.

According to Al Jazeera, the secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said on Monday that the deal with the US includes the immediate suspension of hostilities on all fronts.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said more negotiations are expected to follow Friday’s signing ceremony in Switzerland.

Speaking after a meeting with members of the Iranian parliament’s Economic Commission, Araghchi cautioned that negotiators are moving ahead amid a backdrop of distrust.

Sticking points

For the West, the Strait of Hormuz remains a major sticking point in the deal, while for Tehran, it is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which has uprooted 1.2 million people, that takes centre-stage.

US officials said Monday that ships will move ‘toll-free’ through the Strait of Hormuz under an Iran peace deal signed by President Donald Trump, and insisted that Tehran would have to fulfill its commitments before getting any economic benefits.

They included a possible $300 billion reconstruction fund for the war-battered country, but the release of funds will be “tied to performance”, a senior Trump administration official said in a call with reporters.

The US officials also lashed out at former mediator Oman, which sits on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, and which Trump threatened to bomb last month.

“We were very unhappy with the job the Omanis did,” a second official said. “We felt they were very duplicitous, almost like employees of the Iranians.

Iran has said the deal requires a full cessation of hostilities there, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 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, where he acknowledged that he and Trump have had their differences over the conflict.

“The most important thing is that we saved the State of Israel from the threat of nuclear annihilation,” Netanyahu said, in what were his first comments after Washington and Tehran agreed to a deal to end the Middle East war. However, a US official told Reuters that Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon was not a condition of the deal.

Security sources said fighting had tamped down after the agreement was announced but had not ceased entirely. Israeli figures from across the political spectrum quickly condemned the deal, saying it would not ensure their country’s security.

‘Pyrrhic victory’

Experts see it as a pyrrhic victory for the US, if at all, since no clear victors emerged and Iran, although weakened, succeeded in denying the United States and Israel their aims. “Strategically, geopolitically, the only real winner at this point is Iran,” said Ross Harrison, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

“But that’s a pyrrhic victory,” he added, in that “Iran has won by denying its adversaries… their war aims”, but for “a heavy price”.

“There’s a lot of things that it (Tehran) is getting… that it didn’t have before the war. So by that metric, you could make an argument that Iran won,” Amir Handjani of the US-based Quincy Institute told AFP.

Bernard Hourcade, a specialist on Iran at France’s CNRS research institute, said the deal for US was “perhaps a media victory, but not a political victory” and that Washington had lost global “credibility” through the conflict. The deferral of the nuclear issue is a setback for Israel, which has come out “the biggest loser” , Handjani said. Israel lost momentum with Gulf state relationships, he said, as well as losing leverage with key ally the United States.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2026