WASHINGTON / DUBAI / TEHRAN: After months of US military strikes on Iran, sanctions and a blockade, President Donald Trump said on Sunday that his administration is wat­ching economic pressure mount on Iran, according to an interview with Axios.

“We are low keying it,” Trump was quoted as saying during a brief phone call. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”

Meanwhile, Iran said on Sunday that a deal with Oman defining new shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz was in its final sta­ges but reiterated that the waterway would only reopen once the United Sta­tes met other conditions.

Iran has effectively blockaded the crucial energy conduit since the US and Israel attacked it in late February, and wants to charge tolls for passage, striking ships it accuses of attempting to circumvent its preferred route.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said an agreement on the strait that lies between the two countries was in the “final stages” but repeated comments made on Saturday that it would not reopen it unless other conditions were met. The agreement would set out the new shipping lanes to be used once the US fulfils those conditions and the strait is reopened, Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted him as saying. He denied that Iran was negotiating with the US, saying they were merely “exchanging messages” via intermediaries.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also said that they would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the US complied with the list of demands, including paying compensation for war damage.

Iran’s security chief Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr had laid out on Saturday a list of conditions for reopening the strait, including an end to the “war and aggression against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq”. He also demanded the lifting of a US counter-blockade of Iranian ports, the end of sanctions, the release of frozen assets and compensation for wartime damage. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said their strategy was to maintain the closure “until the enemy accepts all our conditions… the strait is now actually a theatre of war for us and not just a waterway”.

Meeting with Khamenei

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian recently met with supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not appeared in public since assuming the post early in the Middle East war, Khamenei’s office said.

“Dr Masoud Pezeshkian met Ayatollah Mojtaba Kha­menei and spoke with him at the start of his third year in the presidency,” the supreme leader’s office said in a statement, without indicating the date of the meeting.

Khamenei’s office said the two “discussed in detail the country’s issues and problems”, including the “current military situation and future prospects”.

New roles

Khamenei has appointed former commander-in-chief of Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rezaee, as his representative to the Supreme National Security Council, the country’s top security body. His predecessor, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, was also a former Guards commander and took up leadership of the council in March. He will now become a political adviser to Khamenei, according to a statement released by the supreme leader’s office.

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2026