Iran claims victory as US-Iran two-week ceasefire begins

By Steve Holland, Parisa Hafezi, Enas Alashray, Ahmed Tolba and Jasper Ward

The US and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire, reaching a deal less than two hours before President Donald Trump’s deadline for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face the wiping out of “a whole civilisation”.

The announcement by Trump late on Tuesday represented an abrupt turnaround from his extraordinary warning earlier, and came after mediation efforts by Pakistan’s military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, and its Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Sharif later said in a post on X he had invited Iranian and US delegations to meet in Islamabad on Friday.

The eleventh-hour deal was subject to Iran’s agreement to pause its blockade of oil and gas supplies through the strait, Trump said. The waterway typically handles about one-fifth of global oil shipments.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said in a statement Tehran would cease counter-attacks and provide safe passage through the waterway, if attacks against it stop.

Israel supported the decision to suspend strikes on Iran for the two-week period, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said. The ceasefire does not apply to Lebanon, it added, in an apparent contradiction to comments from Sharif, who had said the agreement included a cessation of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon.

“This will be a double-sided ceasefire!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all military objectives and are very far along with a definitive agreement concerning long-term peace with Iran, and peace in the Middle East.”

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council portrayed the deal as a victory over the US, claiming Trump had accepted Iran’s conditions for ending hostilities.

Trump told the French news agency AFP that it was a “total and complete victory“.

“Total and complete victory; 100%. No question about it,” Trump said when asked if he was claiming victory with the ceasefire.

He later said on Truth Social: “A big day for world peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else!”

Iran could start the reconstruction process and the US would help in traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz, he added.

Will ceasefire hold?

A source briefed on the talks expressed wariness about the two-week ceasefire holding, saying the US side believed Iran might be trying to buy time. It was a “trust-building exercise”, the source said.

It was not immediately clear how soon the ceasefire elsewhere would take full effect. Israeli media said it would begin once Iran reopened the strait and that Israel expected Iranian attacks to continue in the interim.

Iraq’s Islamic Resistance also said it would suspend operations in Iraq and across the region for two weeks.

More than an hour after Trump’s announcement, the Israeli military said it had identified missiles launched from Iran, and explosions from intercepted missiles could be heard in Tel Aviv. Gulf countries including Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also issued near-simultaneous alerts and activated air defences.

Israeli media said its military was striking back at launch sites in Iran.

Trump, who has issued a series of threats in recent weeks only to back away, said progress between the two sides had prompted him to agree to the ceasefire. He said Iran had presented a 10-point proposal that was a “workable basis” for negotiations and that he expected an agreement to be “finalised and consummated” during the two-week window.

Trump later said to AFP: “We have a 15-point transaction, of which most of those things have been agreed on. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see if it gets there.”

Markets enjoyed a relief rally as oil prices dropped, stocks and bonds surged and the dollar weakened, bolstered by hope that trade through the strait could resume.

Global leaders also welcomed the ceasefire with the Australian government saying that “the longer the war goes on, the more significant the impact on the global economy will be, and the greater the human cost”.

By agreeing to the ceasefire, Trump may be showing an awareness that the war — which is deeply unpopular in many parts of the US — is dragging on longer than he expected, analysts said.

“In the last few days we’ve seen President Trump wanting to find a route towards a way that the US military can back out of the war with Iran, but also frame that as a kind of victory for the US,” said Jessica Genauer, academic director of the Public Policy Institute at Australia’s University of New South Wales.