Iran War Live Updates: Top Iranian Negotiator Suggests Further Peace Talks Are Possible

Vice President JD Vance said Sunday that a marathon session of negotiations between the United States and Iran had failed to immediately produce an agreement to end the war.

Updated 

April 12, 2026, 6:44 a.m. ET24 minutes ago

Tyler PagerFarnaz FassihiElian Peltier and Aaron Boxerman

Tyler Pager and Elian Peltier reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Here’s the latest

The top Iranian negotiator on Sunday appeared to leave the door open for future diplomacy after marathon peace negotiations between Iran and the United States failed to immediately produce an agreement to end the war.

The fate of the fragile truce now remains uncertain after the 21 hours of talks in Pakistan, led by the Iranian negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and Vice President JD Vance. Mr. Vance said in the early hours of Sunday that Iran had “chosen not to accept our terms,” before departing the capital, Islamabad.

“We leave here with a very simple proposal: a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” Mr. Vance told reporters. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”

Analysts said the issues dividing the two countries were so complex — and their differences so entrenched — that cinching a deal in a single round of talks had been highly unlikely. Javad Zarif, the former Iranian foreign minister, accused the U.S. of seeking to dictate terms to Iran.

Neither Mr. Vance nor Mr. Ghalibaf ruled out another round of negotiations before the two-week cease-fire expires on Apr. 21.

In a statement on social media, Mr. Ghalibaf said that deep mistrust prevailed between the two sides. The last talks between the United States and Iran fizzled, and were promptly followed by a U.S.-Israeli attack in late February that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s longtime supreme leader, and ignited more than a month of war.

The United States had been “unable to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of talks,” said Mr. Ghalibaf. “Now it is time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not.”

Mediated by Pakistan, the negotiations were the highest-level face-to-face encounter between U.S. and Iranian leaders since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Officials said some of the major sticking points included Iran’s grip over the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf waterway for oil and gas, which choked traffic through the waterway decline and sent global energy prices soaring.

President Trump, who was watching a U.F.C. fight in Florida during the talks, had declared the cease-fire last week in part to ease the shock from the loss of access to 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies. The other two key issues were the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released, the officials said.

Mr. Vance did not provide specifics on what the United States had offered Iran, but said the Trump administration was waiting for an “affirmative commitment” that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon or the tools with which to achieve one.

The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all maritime traffic, said two Iranian officials familiar with the talks. Iran refused to give up its leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Strait of Hormuz: The U.S. Defense Department said on Saturday that two U.S. warships crossed the strait to begin an operation to clear mines from the critical waterway. Iran denied the claim. Only a handful of ships have passed through the strait since the cease-fire began. U.S. officials said one reason Iran had been unable to get more ships through was that it could not locate and remove all of the mines it had laid in the waterway.

• Israel and Lebanon: Israel was not involved in the talks, and even though its forces have not struck Iran since the cease-fire was reached, they have continued to strike targets in southern Lebanon, including on Sunday morning, according to Lebanon’s state media. Iran had accused Israel of breaking the cease-fire by continuing to attack in Lebanon, leading Mr. Trump to ask Israel to rein in its assault. The countries’ ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for direct talks.

• Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Saturday said that 2,020 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, including 357 in a wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. At least 22 people had been killed in Israel as of Sunday, as well as 12 Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.

April 12, 2026, 6:15 a.m. ET54 minutes ago

Aaron Boxerman

Reporting from Jerusalem

Seeking to ease criticism at home, Netanyahu says the war with Iran is ‘not yet over.’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel sought to mollify criticism at home that the war with Iran failed to achieve its goals in a televised address on Saturday, even as he pointedly avoided discussing the weekend negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

Last week, President Trump announced a two-week cease-fire in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran to discuss a diplomatic settlement. In U.S.-Iran talks on Saturday in Pakistan, which failed to yield an immediate end to the war, Iran’s leaders showed little sign of bending on U.S. demands to open the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway and to rein in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

Mr. Netanyahu has openly called for the downfall of Iran’s authoritarian clerical rulers.

In a 13-minute address on Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu told the Israeli public that “the battle is not yet over,” without elaborating. He then argued that Israel had already achieved “historic accomplishments” in the fighting.

Vice President JD Vance left the Pakistani capital of Islamabad at around dawn local time on Sunday without a breakthrough in talks with Iranian negotiators. Before leaving, he told reporters that the United States was still seeking assurances that Iran would not “seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”

Some of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies have said that Mr. Vance’s statement indicated that the United States and Israel were closely aligned on their conditions for a cease-fire.

“The American insistence on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons proves the complete coordination between the countries,” Miki Zohar, a government minister who belongs to Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, wrote on social media.

Opinion polls show many Israelis opposed the cease-fire with Iran, which they saw as imposed by Mr. Trump against Israel’s wishes. Opponents of Mr. Netanyahu argued that he failed to achieve the campaign’s main goals — such as destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Former Israeli security officials say that the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, which lasted more than a month, made impressive tactical achievements. But some were skeptical that the war dealt a decisive strategic blow to Iran.

Iran’s ruling system, while battered, is still very much in control, and the country retains large stockpiles of enriched uranium, which it could someday use to build a nuclear weapon.

In his remarks on Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu ticked off a list of top Iranian leaders killed in the U.S.-Israeli air campaign, including the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Gesturing at a map of the Middle East, he noted the blows Israel had dealt to Iran’s network of proxy militias like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon over the past two and a half years. Israel has continued to strike targets in Lebanon, which it says is not included in the cease-fire.

“There are massive achievements here.” Mr. Netanyahu said of the war in Iran. “This is a historic change. We crushed the nuclear program. We crushed the missiles, and we crushed the regime.”

American intelligence, however, has cast doubt on the notion that Iran’s missile capabilities have been badly damaged. U.S. intelligence reports have indicated that Iran has been quickly digging up underground missile storage sites buried by American or Israeli attacks.

Iranian forces managed to fire volleys of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and across parts of the Middle East over more than a month of war, depleting supplies of vital interceptors in a number of countries on the receiving end.

April 12, 2026, 5:44 a.m. ET1 hour ago

Isabel Kershner and Sanam Mahoozi

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and its lead negotiator in the talks with the United States, appeared to leave the door open for further diplomacy. In a statement posted on social media on Sunday, he said that the United States had been “unable to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation in this round of talks,” but that “now it is time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not.”

In his first remarks since the failure of the talks in Pakistan, Ghalibaf also struck the tone of a victor. “At all times, we see strong diplomacy as a parallel track to military action in defending the rights of the Iranian people, and we will not stop for a moment in working to secure the achievements of the forty days of national defense,” he added.

April 12, 2026, 5:06 a.m. ET2 hours ago

Isabel Kershner and Sanam Mahoozi

Javad Zarif, a former Iranian foreign minister, said on social media that it was “not too late” for the United States to learn that it “can’t dictate terms to Iran.” Zarif was in office when the United States reached its nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. President Trump dispensed with that agreement in 2018.

April 12, 2026, 4:12 a.m. ET3 hours ago

Elian Peltier

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan

Islamabad had been on partial lockdown due to the U.S.-Iran talks hosted in the Pakistani capital. Many residents went to bed last night hoping that Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s Parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, would announce a peace agreement or at least a second full day of talks. Neither happened. Mr. Vance and his team sped through the empty streets of the city shortly after the sun rose today, after 21 hours in meeting rooms at the luxury Serena Hotel. “Islamabad Peace Talks” billboards that dotted the city have in many parts been removed, as if tangible prospects of peace and Pakistan’s association with them are fading already.

April 12, 2026, 3:28 a.m. ET4 hours ago

Jin Yu Young

An airstrike killed five and injured others on Sunday in Qana, a town in southern Lebanon, according to the country’s National News Agency.

Lebanon’s news agency also reported a drone strike in Jwaya, another town in southern Lebanon, that caused fires at generators serving a telecommunications company, though it did not identify who was responsible. The Israeli military had said it had carried out a strike in the Jwaya area.

April 12, 2026, 12:37 a.m. ET7 hours ago

Farnaz Fassihi

International reporter

Control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s uranium stockpiles were sticking points.

When talks between the United States and Iran ended just before dawn on Sunday morning without a permanent cease-fire, the Americans said they had made their final best offer and that Iran had not accepted.

“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on, and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on,” Vice President JD Vance said after 21 hours of meetings with top Iranian officials at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad.

Mr. Vance did not say what those red lines were. In the days leading up to the talks, both sides had issued public statements suggesting they remained far apart on several critical issues. They did not even agree on whether the two-week truce they reached on Tuesday applied to fighting in Lebanon, a dispute that nearly derailed the meeting.

By early Sunday, three main sticking points remained, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium; and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released.

The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to relinquish leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the two Iranian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

Iran also sought reparations for damage from six weeks of airstrikes and asked for frozen oil revenues held in Iraq, Luxembourg, Bahrain, Japan, Qatar, Turkey and Germany to be released for reconstruction, the officials said. The Americans refused those requests.

Another point of contention was President Trump’s demand that Iran hand over or sell its entire stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium. Iran made a counterproposal, but the sides were unable to reach a compromise, the officials said.

“When two serious teams with an intention for a deal come to the table, it has to be a win-win for both. It is unrealistic to think we can come out of this without making any serious concessions; the same holds true for the Americans,” said Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Tehran, in a telephone interview.

Even though the meetings ended without an agreement, the fact that they took place at all was a sign of progress. Just six weeks earlier, the United States and Israel had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an airstrike, and Iranian officials vowed to avenge his death. At the time, the prospect of any high-level meeting between Iranian and American officials seemed remote.

Still, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the head of Iran’s Parliament and an influential military commander, led the Iranian delegation and met face-to-face with Mr. Vance. The two men shook hands, and the talks was described as cordial and calm, the two senior Iranian officials familiar with the talks said. While no diplomatic breakthrough was reached, a taboo — shaped by decades of hostility, sharp rhetoric and chants in Iran of “death to America” — was broken.

The meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Ghalibaf was the highest-level face-to-face engagement between representatives of Iran and the United States since diplomatic relations were severed in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution. Shortly afterward, Iran’s new rulers stormed the U.S. Embassy and took American diplomats hostage.

“This is the most serious and sustained direct talks between the U.S. and Iran, and it reflects the intention of both sides to end this war,” said Vali Nasr, a professor and Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University. “And there has been clearly positive momentum for the talks to go as long as they have and not break down.”

April 12, 2026, 12:09 a.m. ET7 hours ago

Tyler Pager and David E. Sanger

Tyler Pager traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad for the negotiations with Iran. David E. Sanger has covered the efforts to use sabotage, negotiation and military force to end the Iranian nuclear program over the past two decades.

What now? The failure of marathon talks leaves Trump with difficult options.

Vice President JD Vance’s failure to win the concessions the United States sought from Iran in a single, marathon negotiating session over its nuclear program was no surprise.

But what now?

The failure leaves the Trump administration facing several unpalatable options: A lengthy negotiation with Tehran over the future of its nuclear program, or a resumption of a war that has already created the largest energy disruption in modern times, and the prospect of a long struggle over who controls the Strait of Hormuz.

White House officials said they would defer to President Trump, who traveled to Florida for the weekend to attend an Ultimate Fighting Championship match, to announce the administration’s next move. But each of those paths carries significant strategic and political downsides.

Mr. Vance said little about what took place during more than 21 hours of negotiations, suggesting he had handed the Iranians a take-it-or-leave-it proposal to forever terminate their nuclear program, and they left it.

“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are,” Mr. Vance told reporters, “what things we’re willing to accommodate them on.” He added, “They have chosen not to accept our terms.”

In that respect, this negotiation appears to have differed little from the one that ended in deadlock in Geneva in late February, leading Mr. Trump to order what became 38 days of missile and bombing attacks across Iran, aimed at its missile stockpiles, its military bases and the industrial base inside Iran that produces new weaponry.

But Mr. Trump’s bet, one he described several times over the past month, was that Iran would change its mind once faced with a huge demonstration of American military prowess, with more than 13,000 targets hit, according to the Pentagon. The Iranians, for their part, were determined to show that no amount of American ordnance would force them to give way.

“The heavy loss of our great elders, dear ones, and fellow countrymen has made our response to pursue the Iranian nation’s interests and rights firmer than ever before,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement as Mr. Vance headed to a military airfield to leave for home, empty-handed for now.

Perhaps that will change. But the administration’s fear of being sucked into a complex, lengthy conversation with Iran is palpable. Mr. Trump believes that he emerged the victor of the conflict, and therefore, as the special envoy Steve Witkoff puts it, Iran should simply “capitulate.”

That is not how it happened in the past. The last major agreement between Tehran and Washington, reached during the Obama administration, took two years to negotiate. And it was full of compromises, including allowing Iran to retain a small amount of its nuclear stockpile, and gradually lifting the restrictions on its nuclear activities until 2030, when Iran would be permitted to conduct any nuclear activity permissible under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

But the deadlock Mr. Vance ran into was essentially the same as the ones that derailed negotiations in late February, and prompted Mr. Trump to order the attack. (That negotiation was run by Mr. Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who were present in Islamabad during the more than 20 hours of negotiations.)

Back then, the Iranians offered to “suspend” their nuclear operations for a few years, but not to give up their stockpiles of near-bomb-grade uranium or permanently surrender the capability to enrich uranium on their own soil.

To the Iranians, that is their right as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits them to never making a nuclear weapon. To the Americans, it is what Mr. Witkoff called “a tell” that Iran always wants a ready option to build a nuclear weapon, even if it never exercises that option.

Thirty-eight days of war appear to have hardened that view, not loosened it.

Mr. Trump’s chief leverage now comes in his ability to threaten to resume major combat operations. After all, the fragile two-week cease-fire ends on April 21. But while the threat of resuming combat operations may be invoked in coming days, it not a particularly viable political choice for Mr. Trump — and the Iranians know it.

Mr. Trump declared the cease-fire last week in large part to stem the pain from the loss of 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies, which was sending the price of gasoline soaring, and creating shortages of fertilizer and, among other critical supplies, helium for the production of semiconductors. Markets rose on the prospect of an agreement, even an incomplete or unsatisfactory one. Should the war resume, the markets would most likely decline, the shortages would worsen and inflation — already up to 3.3 percent — would almost inevitably rise.

And that leaves the most urgent issue: the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians, in their own description of the meeting, put it first among their list of issues discussed. “In the past 24 hours, discussions were held on various dimensions of the main topics, including the Strait of Hormuz, the nuclear issue, war reparations, lifting of sanctions and the complete end to the war against Iran,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement.

It was a notable list, since the closing of the strait was not an issue until after the war started and the Iranians decided to make use of their most potent weapon of economic chaos.

Now control of the waterway is wrapped in Iran’s other demands, including that the United States pay for damage done to Iran in the course of the bombing and missile strikes, and that it lift more than two decades of sanctions against the country. The United States has rejected the first idea, and said the second could happen only slowly, as the Iranians put in place their part of a deal.

What Mr. Vance’s trip made clear is that both sides think they emerged as the victor of the first round: the United States by dropping so much ordnance on Iran, the Iranians by surviving. Neither seems in the mood for compromise.

April 12, 2026, 12:05 a.m. ET7 hours ago

Jin Yu Young

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, said in a state broadcast on Sunday morning that it was “imperative” that the parties uphold their commitment to a ceasefire after talks between the two sides to end the war in the Middle East ended without an agreement.

April 12, 2026, 12:04 a.m. ET7 hours ago

Farnaz Fassihi

International reporter

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, told state media that Iran and the U.S. had reached an agreement on some points but a few issues, such as the Strait of Hormuz, prevented a final breakthrough. “These talks happened in the aftermath of a 40-day war and in an ambiance of mistrust and skepticism,” Mr. Baqaei said, according to Iran’s official news agency, IRNA. “Naturally, we should have never expected to reach a deal in one session. We will continue to work to bring the two views of Americans and Iranians closer together.”